Kip Theno: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Road to Care podcast hosted by SamaCare, where we'll talk with key opinion leaders, physicians, administrators, manufacturers, venture capitalists, and legislators to get their insights on the state of healthcare today. And where we see it evolving SamaCare's prior authorization platform is free to clinics, ensuring patients get on the right therapy at the right time.
Together we can simply make things right.
All right, and we are live. And hey everybody. Welcome back to the Road to Care podcast hosted by SamaCare. And I am ready to drop the gloves because Jeremy Roenick is our special guest today, JR is a celebrated NHLAll-Star Hall of Famer, Olympic Athlete and Sports Icon. As one of the greatest and grittiest American-born hockey players of all time, and a sports commentator JR showed unparalleled commitment to both physical and mental resiliency. He brings that commitment to his new calling, which is helping healthcare achieve peak [00:01:00] performance.His company, MediChainX, leverages cutting edge blockchain technology to reshape the way medical data is handled and protected, paving the way for better care, stronger trust, and a more connected future.
So JR how are you man?
Jeremy Roenick: I'm doing great, Kip. Great to be on with you pal, this is awesome.
Kip Theno: Well, it's been a long time and I'm glad we reconnected now, selfishly, we do have to talk hockey a little bit and just for our subscribers and all the listeners out there, JR actually crushed my hopes and dreams when I was a Bantam and he was aBantam.
He was playing for a team called the New Jersey Rockets. I was playing for a team called the Indianapolis Bisons. Yep. Um, and in the national championships, I think this was the semifinals, your team beat us five to two, and you had a hat trick in that game, JR do you remember those, those games at all?
Jeremy Roenick: I do actually.
It was, well, it was two, two, my favorite years of playing hockey, my two bantam years where we won back to back national championships.But um, I [00:02:00] remember that team, theIndianapolis Bisons. I don't remember the game or the goals, but I do remember that whole experience of going through the national championships and through the tournament.
And I know the first one I had separated my shoulder in the quarter final game, I had to play two games with a totally separated shoulder, and the final, the final against the Chicago young Americans went six overtimes until, I had two goals and assists that in that final game, which gave me my first real taste of, of being a champion.
And I just, I just loved it.
Kip Theno: Yeah.Shocking that you had that many goals, but, so I, I do, by the way. It's okay that you don't remember me. That's fine. I'm not hurt by it. But I remember watching the back of your jersey literally for three periods and it was just a pleasure and I'll, I'll never forget those days.
And by the way, so you won those two national championships ,and just for the listeners out there, this doesn't happen very often today and it actually didn't happen very often in the 80's, when JR you were put into theNHL, I think Steve [00:03:00] Yzerman went in right outta high school, outta juniors, you won two national championships and then to the NHL outta high school.
What was that like ?
Jeremy Roenick: It was crazy. 'cause I, it, it was my bantam year was my second bantam year was my freshman year and literally, I bet you I weighed 140 pounds in my freshman yea rand two years later I turned pro and walked onto an NHL, arena surface to playin the NHL.
So it's a, it was a very, very fast track from Bantam to high school, right to the NHL, which I don't think many people have been able to do that route. But, uh, I was fortunate enough to get done.
Kip Theno: He did.And then after that, I it's in the history books, right? You were 20 seasons, I think five teams here.
A couple statistical questions for you. I'm sure you can rattle these off, but I might have a surprise for you, JR so how many goals did you end up with in your career?
Jeremy Roenick: 513regular season?
Kip Theno: Yep. And ,and, and your 500th was with San Jose. Do you remember that goal?
Jeremy Roenick: Yep.It was the best dump in. That I've ever had.
It was a ring, [00:04:00] uh, shot around the glass that hit the partition, redirected towards the net. The goaltender had come out to try to corral the puck and got caught out of position. And then as he scurried back to the front, the puck was going in the net. He kind of slapped, stick the puck a little bit and actually threw it into his own net.
So, so since I was the last. The last opposing team player to touch the puck. I got the goal. That's how my 500th goal went in.
Kip Theno: Well, congrats man. Five 13, that's a story for you. Five. 5
Jeremy Roenick: 0 1was a beauty. It was a, it was a snapshot lace, top shelf, far corner. It was a thing of beauty. So, um, I made up for it. The next goal,
Kip Theno: you had a wicked shot, but my favorite of you is you would always go, wheels around left side, come in that sweet, left to right, deke move.
Goalies were just statues at that point. Yeah,
Jeremy Roenick: we called it, uh, we called it the bean pot. Come in, take a little move to the left, hammer on the brakes and throw it into an empty net. So we see it a little bit more today, but you didn't see it too often back in the the eighties and nineties.
Kip Theno: No, not a lot from [00:05:00] you. I think those kids today are obviously watching film of you and then assist you remember how many assists you ended up with.
Jeremy Roenick: I had703 assists for 1,216 total points. I think it was like 1,530 games and over1500 minutes of penalties, which you gotta be a little bit excited about also.
Kip Theno: I'm excited, and that's where I was going. You actually took the penalty minutes because if you, if we do some potato math, that's actually 731 or over about740 actual penalties, probably not including the five minute majors and the misconducts, but you've got a great story. You know, there's always mentors and coaches throughout the career.
I think we've all had 'em. You certainly had 'em where when you went to the NHL, like you said, you were a buck 40 soaking wet playing against these monsters. And, Coach Mike Keenan, who was a badass. He was a tough coach.Ooh. Was he ever did something with you to change your game, to earn all those penalty minutes, by the way, do you remember that story?
Jeremy Roenick: Yeah.Well, he, well, I wasn't, I wasn't a tough player. I wasn't a physical player.I was just a finesse, skate as fast as I can and scored as many goals. But going [00:06:00] to Chicago at the time, MikeKeenan was coming from Philly, they had that, you know, that broadstreet bully mentality. He wanted to have a tough, physical, very mean hockey team.
And that just wasn't my style. And in my first preseason game,I'm flying around, you know, going past checks, swinging by other players, wouldn't finish my checks. And Keenan's like, "Nope, this is not gonna fly with me." And he came down to the bench and he grabbed me by the neck and literally choked me while screaming in my, into my face and said a lot of profanities and, you know, pretty much threatening my entire NHL existence on whether I was gonna finish my check and start hitting somebody. So, you know, I put on a pair of football pads, shoulder pads, and started, you know, turn myself into a human torpedo to please my coach.
And I found that, I really enjoyed hitting people hard. I really enjoyed the, you know, how it felt. I enjoyed getting hit. Um, and I found I enjoyed it and fans enjoyed it. So it became part of my, kind of, part of my repertoire, [00:07:00] which, I don't know if there's many players that have kind of combined the finesse goalscoring, playmaking fighting, hitting, you know, the total conglomerate that I had through 21 years.
Kip Theno: No, no. I mean that you're, you were the triple threat guy and I would imagine just that, just getting over that barrier of toughness to be able to go crush guys and not worry if they crushed you back that it, it probably elongated your career.Right? I.
Jeremy Roenick: I don't know whether it elongated my career.
Um, I was fortunate enough to play 21 years, so I was blessed with a durable body, took care of myself. And, one good thing that saved me isI did things properly. I was taught how to do it properly. I did it while protecting myself. And also, you know, even though I would look like I was out of control, like I was a little reckless.
I always, always seemed to have my body in the right place whenI was getting hit, and I always made sure that I hit with the most powerful part of my body. So I wasn't susceptible to injury. So I was, I, I think I did it in a, [00:08:00] in a very educated, smart way than just being a total, you know, psycho
Kip Theno: mental as you would say.
Thank you for the walk down memory Lane JR. So you listen the journey from NHL Hall of Famer toHealthcare Innovator. I certainly would've thought it would've been in dentistry or orthodontics.
That's talk. Talk to me about that.
Jeremy Roenick: Listen, if I was my own patient forever and I had a bunch of people just like me, I would definitely would be investing in the dental, in the dental side of healthcare. You know, it was kind of funny, I think being a professional athlete or being in the limelight or being around as many people as I have or just in general, I hate the word celebrity, but being in the public eye, you get a lot of opportunities to do things in many different industries.
I own a whiskey called Whiskey in the Wild. It's my own. I own a golf course I'm part of EA Sports,I'm part of golf, you know, building golf greens. And an opportunity came up about a year, a little over a year ago, seeing what's happening in the world today in the industry, [00:09:00] especially of tech and the different sectors of healthcare and just being a part of technology today, um, to do a blockchain technology. Blockchain is new to the game. It's obviously, it's been around for a few years, but nobody's really tested the accuracy or has really challenged how great blockchain can actually be for data storage, for the movement of data.
We've seen a lot of things happen in the healthcare industry these days with bad actors, with companies getting hacked, they're holding up their businesses for ransom. You know, United Healthcare they have millions and millions and millions and millions of people that literally are handcuffed and you can't do anything as in terms of running a business or protecting these people.
So, it was an awesome idea and it's an awesome mentality because with the ever changing world of tech and what it can do and its powers and the things that are making [00:10:00]things faster and safer. These are the technologies that all companies are gonna be moving to.
Everybody says, well, technology scares everybody . And that istrue. But there is no question in my mind that the healthcare world, the processing world, a lot of the world is going to be moving to blockchain to store their very important data. The cloud-based system that everybody's on now has been compromised.
We have seen that over and over and over again. The bad players in the world and these scammers can now get into that cloud base and pretty much hold an entire industry captive and with a blockchain that is. Pretty much impossible to do. And so I was like, this is, this is a great place to be future technology. Our company, we are the top three best blockchain builders in the world. And we're, we are looking to change people's lives in healthcare , change the [00:11:00] security, change the way that healthcare does their business from day to day? Unfortunately there are a lot of hospital systems and a lot of the medical world are on archaic systems and seems like some of them are still on dial up.
I mean, that's how, just how old these systems are and not only does it take time to process the transferring of people's health records, but all these people are at risk of having their entire programs shut down and when we're dealing with as many people as we deal with today that are sick, that need attention, that need tobe in the best care at hand, we cannot afford to be shut down by bad actors.And you gotta do everything we can to protect people's data, protect the system, even more so give your healthcare records back to where they should be and where they should belong.
And that's with the patient. Each person should own their own healthcare records. It shouldn't be sitting in the cloud with, with all the other people on the archaic medical [00:12:00] data field.
Kip Theno: Yeah.Well, and I'm gonna double down on that 'cause our listeners obviously are all in healthcare, right?
I think hopefully there's a lot of hockey fans too. Blockchain maybe not so much. Our company, SamaCare, JR we're still dealing in a digital world that still uses faxes in 2025, but that you brought up like, look, X got hit last week with a massive attack and they've got military grade protection.That United Health subsidiary and then impacted Change Healthcare. It impacted all the clinics. The GPOs, yep. Impacted 190 million people. It's a third ofAmericans, and actually the cost was about $3 billion.
So I guess let's go to the home run question. I think the bad actors are getting better. That's a part of it. Technology's getting better. The cloud-based technology's not getting better from a protective standpoint. So if blockchain, if MediChainX as an example, your company using blockchain, would that have been much harder or impossible for that breach to happen?
Jeremy Roenick: It would, it would be almost be impossible.
Now listen, with blockchain, the way blockchain is built and it says [00:13:00] chain, right? So when you say blockchain, all the information goes on a chain where each chain is its own individual link to that person or to that, that data piece, it's not connected to anything else. The crazy thing about cloud base is when all the information is getting stored in a database for a company, allt hat data goes into a cloud and it's all amongst each other. So if a bad actor gets in and compromises that cloud, it can get all the information off of that cloud. Everything is susceptible. Whereas in a blockchain, a bad actor might be able to get into a chain. It'll only get into that one piece of data, and there might be billions and billions of chains on that, on that chain of data.
So it's really not beneficial for a bad actor to go in and only have one person's information.So to get the part of the whole chain is virtually impossible. So when you talk about protecting your [00:14:00] data and making sure that data is stored in a safe place, can get transferred from one place to another, extremely fast and safe.
You'll be able to control the payment rails from the patient to the provider, from the provider, to the employee, from the insurance company to the provider. It's the amount of speed and accuracy. That you can do not to mention the size of payments that can be made on a blockchain.
It is the best way and the most productive way to store and transfer data all around the world because it's borderless transfer.
Wouldn't it be nice that if we all had our own medical number, blockchain number, and anywhere we go in the world and something happens and you have to go to a doctor, you have to goto a hospital and they ask you what your medical number is, and they can pull up your entire health history right there at a speed second time, you don't have to reach back to your provider back home or call your physician back home to get your [00:15:00] data records. You literally own them and you can transfer them. All over the world, you know, borderless. I mean, that becomes a very powerful key and instrument to have when you're talking about taking care and getting the speediest mo best care possible, and nobody can access that without permission from you.
That is a very important part , of the world, protecting your own information and making it easier for the hospitals to really, to collect, to maneuver through, and to do a lot of the processing that happens throughout the medical world. There's too many levels and too many variables that come into the way that it's done now, where mistakes can happen.
We talked about the data breaches. That can happen. The blockchain will take away 95/96% of all of those problems in a second.
Kip Theno: Yeah. I mean, you think about those data breaches, we're talking about huge organizations, Metadata as an example, and then you just actually brought it down to the patient level.
And look, you're a [00:16:00] patient.I'm a patient, I have no idea where my data is. I have no idea how to control it, where the command and control is. So you guys over there have figured out a way to have the patient have control in line of sight. So walk us through patients, how did they, how easy is it for them to use this technology to then feel very confident they can access their, their information and it's protected all, all day long?
Jeremy Roenick: Yeah.And that, I think that's the scariest thing for everybody, right? Because everything is technology and if you're not a tech person and you don't have very good skills in maneuvering through apps and through all that kind of stuff, it can get a little bit tricky.
But, it simply is the front end dashboard. A lot of these companies will be able to sign up onto the blockchain. Each individual member and patient would enter into that front end. Just like being in an app. And once you go into that app, you're gonna have to sign up and at that sign up, you'll be given your blockchain number.
And that blockchain number is then connected to all of your information once the medical field moves [00:17:00]all that information into your personal profile. So, again, it's like signing up for an app. But, with a few more steps that it walks you right through .
In the late eighties, early nineties, we had information sitting in cabinet drawers. We had to move all that information from paper information onto a computer, and then from the computer with on disk drives then we had to move to the cloud base. So technology is a scary thing, but it gets easier and better and faster as it goes. And it's a process. It wouldn't be a process that would happen overnight. It would be a gradual build from an organization. But, it's gonna happen.
It's not gonna be an "if" blockchain is gonna be used, it's a "when". And the companies that do get on board with blockchain earlier now are gonna have so much more once everybody else starts going over. They're not gonna even have a bleep in their day-to-day business dealings.
And the amount of money [00:18:00]that they can save because of the transactions fees that happen. There's so many benefits to it. So yeah, it would be a little bit difficult. People have to learn it, but I know people who didn't know how to text and now they're sending emails and texts and I know people that didn't know how to get ontoFacebook. People adapt and they'll justhave to adapt to this, to the best protection in data.
And that's blockchain.
Kip Theno: Well, I'm interested in this quote unquote, I'm gonna use the term power play because you mentioned two things there that I think are significant. One is, look, we have the accumulated knowledge of all of mankind in the palm of our hand with a cellphone. Right. And I think people are more savvy than maybe we give them credit for, in healthcare for apps and utilizing remote patient monitoring, and being educated by their clinics. But then there's the other side, there's the large entity, so the healthcare systems, they're still on these antiquated protection platforms. You've got the revenue cycle management companies. You have the, the payers, the insurers, right? Yep. There's a lot of inertia that can happen trying to get those big entities to [00:19:00]change and be the tip of the sword.
For a company like you guys in MediChainX and utilizing blockchain, what's the power play there for you all in the strategy?
Jeremy Roenick: Well, it's obviously, it's the accuracy of everything, right? And it's getting it out there in in medical it's very tricky 'cause everything has to be HIPAA compliant.
So, making sure everything is HIPAA compliant through the process of building the blockchain becomes very, very important. Accuracy, speed, and making sure that the entire informational highway that happens through healthcare. Uh, we do the same thing in processing, credit card processing.
There are steps to doing everything. There are steps for a patient to walk into the to clinic, you know, go get the service. And where that data goes, where that information goes. You know, you have people that are going to pharmacies to get their prescriptions, you know, all that stuff has to be put under the blockchain. So the size and scope is crazy, but the "pay attention to detail" --that's [00:20:00] always the case for us. So we've done a tremendous amount of work and information diving and finding out everything that needs to happen for different industries, because healthcare, whether you're a healthcare company, you're gonna have different processes than a medical establishment than a hospital will. So, it's like I said, it's a big lift, but it's, like I said, we're one of the top three blockchain builders in the world. And, time's on our side. We're beating the trend right now.
So we're in front of everybody.
Kip Theno: Your, your tip of the sword and trailblazers are, you know, they often go through those pains, right? But I think it's also awareness. Look after talking to you a bunch of times on this, I can only find a couple. I mean, there's, there's a humanity protocol for digital identity verification.
There's another company that uses blockchain to protect industrial operations. Security. Yep. I had a hard time finding any competition in healthcare. Now competition is good for everybody and raises awareness. But are you guys like the first or are there others and, and what sets you apart?
Jeremy Roenick: No, there's others that have built the blockchain, but it becomes very important [00:21:00] how you start your business and I think what the early people that went to the blockchain, they made mistakes that made it very difficult. They went the one by one aspect, trying to sign one person up, another person up another person up. The best way that you can go about building a blockchain and making sure you have the big biggest success is acquiring the right partners to jump on board to start the process with you. So it's, it's kind of starting from the top up, right? Getting a company, let's say like UnitedHealthcare that has 300 million customers. Right there allows you to build a blockchain and have instant success as a company. 'Cause to just go the one by ones piece by piece, a will be way too long and two, it'll be way too difficult and frustrating.
So that's kind of the thesis and mentality. 'Cause everybody's gonna be going to blockchain, there's no question about it. You're gonna see more and more hack, more and [00:22:00] more companies that are gonna be put out of business. If not put out of business.
They're going to lose millions and millions of dollars while their systems are shut down. The blockchain will prevent all of that. And again, new technology always. Always wins off of old technology. It's just like death and taxes. That's a sure thing in the world.
There's no question that new technology will always outpace old technology.
Kip Theno: Well, it's like the old 20 pound wooden co-host sticks you and I used to use versus the carbon fiber, you know, hyper lights that are out there today. Right?
Jeremy Roenick: Exactly right. Exactly. Yeah. You don't see anybody today using good oldSherwood wood sticks anymore.
Kip Theno: No, no, we should go back to that. You know, there's something about it, but I think it's also taking notice, like these, these massive attacks and breaches are, are making people kind of sit up higher in their chair. By the way, I had a chance to talk to your technology team. The way that they're gonna be integrating, their APIs to EMRs and HR is gonna make this easier.
Not gonna be a massive headache, but definitely I think a [00:23:00] change in mindset. So we want to get it out there JR.
I've got a couple Easter egg questions for you, but before we do that. For MediChainX and yourself, how can payers and companies and healthcare systems, and really anybody that's interested in this new technology reach you guys, what's the contact they should be looking for?
Jeremy Roenick: Uh,so, you can go to MediChainX.io. We're forever expanding our website and building our website. That's pretty much where you would go. Go on Google and read a bunch about us. Um, there are, there are contact information on Google.
We've worked so hard on building the blockchains and building the information that the one thing that is the last to come, which should be one of the first is our website.
But, definitely go to MediChainX.io.
Kip Theno: We'll doit and we're gonna get it out there in the masses. So, JR a couple Easter egg questions, and I know some of your mates, old mates might be listening to this. I don't want you to, you know, do anything that'll get you in trouble. But who was the toughest player you ever played against and who was the best all around hockey player that you remember playing [00:24:00] against?
Jeremy Roenick: Well, the toughest, I mean, toughest in, there's two different kinds of tough, there's tough fighting and then there's tough just, just all around tough, physically tough, mentally tough, you know, dirty, tough. Mark Messier was the toughest person that I had to play against his mentality. He would hurt you, he would hit you, he would slash you, he would score goals against you.
And it was just so frustrating to play against somebody like that. As far as the best, you know, everybody talks about know Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky, Messier I throw up in there, Peter Forsberg, I throw up in there, Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman, I mean, I played in the best generation in the history of hockey from 1988 until 2003 when Gretz and Mario retired.
The amount of talent that played in the nineties is unimaginable. And, I was fortunate enough to play in that time. But, Mario, for me still, he [00:25:00] would've, if he would've stayed healthy and didn't get sick, and I think, he would've broke the goals records that Ovechkin's getting ready to break. But who would've thought, who would've thought anybody would break, Wayne Gretzky's record, but looks like Ovie's gonna do it. Maybe not this year, but soon, which is one of the most unbelievable achievements in pro sports.
Kip Theno: Yeah, heis like seven or eight away.
That's gonna be crazy. But you know, records are made to be broken and he played in that great era. I'll never forget those Coyotes, RedWings playoffs games back in the nineties that those were awesome and I'll finish with this: my son, he's 14 u, he's a bantam playing.
We play the old Sega Genesis. You mentioned EA sports, right?He actually traded you from the Coyotes and you are now on a line in our Sega Genesis game with Yzerman and Fedorov, so I can't Oh boy. Look out. It's not
Jeremy Roenick: fair.That's an unbeatable line. You know, it's not so much me, it's Roenick
he's good.
Kip Theno: Well, listen, we appreciate you being on the Road to Care podcast. Everybody out there get in touch with MediChainX. We're gonna get this out. And JR thank youso much and congratulations on a wonderful career in a transition to innovating[00:26:00] Healthcare for everyone out there.Thanks, JR
Jeremy Roenick:thanks Kip. Appreciate it buddy.
Kip Theno: Thank you for joining the Road to Care podcast, hosted by SamaCare, the leader in prior authorization technology and services, where through a script to therapy operating system, we enable connectivity with clinics, payers, and manufacturers focused on optimizing patient care. Tune in next time as together we can make things right.
Enjoy the music written, produced, and recorded by Jamestown.
Podcast produced by JFACTOR, visit https://www.jfactor.com/
Together, we can make healthcare right. Here are some of the outstanding healthcare organizations and associations championing patient health mentioned in this episode:
Kip Theno: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Road to Care podcast hosted by SamaCare, where we'll talk with key opinion leaders, physicians, administrators, manufacturers, venture capitalists, and legislators to get their insights on the state of healthcare today. And where we see it evolving SamaCare's prior authorization platform is free to clinics, ensuring patients get on the right therapy at the right time.
Together we can simply make things right.
All right, and we are live. And hey everybody. Welcome back to the Road to Care podcast hosted by SamaCare. And I am ready to drop the gloves because Jeremy Roenick is our special guest today, JR is a celebrated NHLAll-Star Hall of Famer, Olympic Athlete and Sports Icon. As one of the greatest and grittiest American-born hockey players of all time, and a sports commentator JR showed unparalleled commitment to both physical and mental resiliency. He brings that commitment to his new calling, which is helping healthcare achieve peak [00:01:00] performance.His company, MediChainX, leverages cutting edge blockchain technology to reshape the way medical data is handled and protected, paving the way for better care, stronger trust, and a more connected future.
So JR how are you man?
Jeremy Roenick: I'm doing great, Kip. Great to be on with you pal, this is awesome.
Kip Theno: Well, it's been a long time and I'm glad we reconnected now, selfishly, we do have to talk hockey a little bit and just for our subscribers and all the listeners out there, JR actually crushed my hopes and dreams when I was a Bantam and he was aBantam.
He was playing for a team called the New Jersey Rockets. I was playing for a team called the Indianapolis Bisons. Yep. Um, and in the national championships, I think this was the semifinals, your team beat us five to two, and you had a hat trick in that game, JR do you remember those, those games at all?
Jeremy Roenick: I do actually.
It was, well, it was two, two, my favorite years of playing hockey, my two bantam years where we won back to back national championships.But um, I [00:02:00] remember that team, theIndianapolis Bisons. I don't remember the game or the goals, but I do remember that whole experience of going through the national championships and through the tournament.
And I know the first one I had separated my shoulder in the quarter final game, I had to play two games with a totally separated shoulder, and the final, the final against the Chicago young Americans went six overtimes until, I had two goals and assists that in that final game, which gave me my first real taste of, of being a champion.
And I just, I just loved it.
Kip Theno: Yeah.Shocking that you had that many goals, but, so I, I do, by the way. It's okay that you don't remember me. That's fine. I'm not hurt by it. But I remember watching the back of your jersey literally for three periods and it was just a pleasure and I'll, I'll never forget those days.
And by the way, so you won those two national championships ,and just for the listeners out there, this doesn't happen very often today and it actually didn't happen very often in the 80's, when JR you were put into theNHL, I think Steve [00:03:00] Yzerman went in right outta high school, outta juniors, you won two national championships and then to the NHL outta high school.
What was that like ?
Jeremy Roenick: It was crazy. 'cause I, it, it was my bantam year was my second bantam year was my freshman year and literally, I bet you I weighed 140 pounds in my freshman yea rand two years later I turned pro and walked onto an NHL, arena surface to playin the NHL.
So it's a, it was a very, very fast track from Bantam to high school, right to the NHL, which I don't think many people have been able to do that route. But, uh, I was fortunate enough to get done.
Kip Theno: He did.And then after that, I it's in the history books, right? You were 20 seasons, I think five teams here.
A couple statistical questions for you. I'm sure you can rattle these off, but I might have a surprise for you, JR so how many goals did you end up with in your career?
Jeremy Roenick: 513regular season?
Kip Theno: Yep. And ,and, and your 500th was with San Jose. Do you remember that goal?
Jeremy Roenick: Yep.It was the best dump in. That I've ever had.
It was a ring, [00:04:00] uh, shot around the glass that hit the partition, redirected towards the net. The goaltender had come out to try to corral the puck and got caught out of position. And then as he scurried back to the front, the puck was going in the net. He kind of slapped, stick the puck a little bit and actually threw it into his own net.
So, so since I was the last. The last opposing team player to touch the puck. I got the goal. That's how my 500th goal went in.
Kip Theno: Well, congrats man. Five 13, that's a story for you. Five. 5
Jeremy Roenick: 0 1was a beauty. It was a, it was a snapshot lace, top shelf, far corner. It was a thing of beauty. So, um, I made up for it. The next goal,
Kip Theno: you had a wicked shot, but my favorite of you is you would always go, wheels around left side, come in that sweet, left to right, deke move.
Goalies were just statues at that point. Yeah,
Jeremy Roenick: we called it, uh, we called it the bean pot. Come in, take a little move to the left, hammer on the brakes and throw it into an empty net. So we see it a little bit more today, but you didn't see it too often back in the the eighties and nineties.
Kip Theno: No, not a lot from [00:05:00] you. I think those kids today are obviously watching film of you and then assist you remember how many assists you ended up with.
Jeremy Roenick: I had703 assists for 1,216 total points. I think it was like 1,530 games and over1500 minutes of penalties, which you gotta be a little bit excited about also.
Kip Theno: I'm excited, and that's where I was going. You actually took the penalty minutes because if you, if we do some potato math, that's actually 731 or over about740 actual penalties, probably not including the five minute majors and the misconducts, but you've got a great story. You know, there's always mentors and coaches throughout the career.
I think we've all had 'em. You certainly had 'em where when you went to the NHL, like you said, you were a buck 40 soaking wet playing against these monsters. And, Coach Mike Keenan, who was a badass. He was a tough coach.Ooh. Was he ever did something with you to change your game, to earn all those penalty minutes, by the way, do you remember that story?
Jeremy Roenick: Yeah.Well, he, well, I wasn't, I wasn't a tough player. I wasn't a physical player.I was just a finesse, skate as fast as I can and scored as many goals. But going [00:06:00] to Chicago at the time, MikeKeenan was coming from Philly, they had that, you know, that broadstreet bully mentality. He wanted to have a tough, physical, very mean hockey team.
And that just wasn't my style. And in my first preseason game,I'm flying around, you know, going past checks, swinging by other players, wouldn't finish my checks. And Keenan's like, "Nope, this is not gonna fly with me." And he came down to the bench and he grabbed me by the neck and literally choked me while screaming in my, into my face and said a lot of profanities and, you know, pretty much threatening my entire NHL existence on whether I was gonna finish my check and start hitting somebody. So, you know, I put on a pair of football pads, shoulder pads, and started, you know, turn myself into a human torpedo to please my coach.
And I found that, I really enjoyed hitting people hard. I really enjoyed the, you know, how it felt. I enjoyed getting hit. Um, and I found I enjoyed it and fans enjoyed it. So it became part of my, kind of, part of my repertoire, [00:07:00] which, I don't know if there's many players that have kind of combined the finesse goalscoring, playmaking fighting, hitting, you know, the total conglomerate that I had through 21 years.
Kip Theno: No, no. I mean that you're, you were the triple threat guy and I would imagine just that, just getting over that barrier of toughness to be able to go crush guys and not worry if they crushed you back that it, it probably elongated your career.Right? I.
Jeremy Roenick: I don't know whether it elongated my career.
Um, I was fortunate enough to play 21 years, so I was blessed with a durable body, took care of myself. And, one good thing that saved me isI did things properly. I was taught how to do it properly. I did it while protecting myself. And also, you know, even though I would look like I was out of control, like I was a little reckless.
I always, always seemed to have my body in the right place whenI was getting hit, and I always made sure that I hit with the most powerful part of my body. So I wasn't susceptible to injury. So I was, I, I think I did it in a, [00:08:00] in a very educated, smart way than just being a total, you know, psycho
Kip Theno: mental as you would say.
Thank you for the walk down memory Lane JR. So you listen the journey from NHL Hall of Famer toHealthcare Innovator. I certainly would've thought it would've been in dentistry or orthodontics.
That's talk. Talk to me about that.
Jeremy Roenick: Listen, if I was my own patient forever and I had a bunch of people just like me, I would definitely would be investing in the dental, in the dental side of healthcare. You know, it was kind of funny, I think being a professional athlete or being in the limelight or being around as many people as I have or just in general, I hate the word celebrity, but being in the public eye, you get a lot of opportunities to do things in many different industries.
I own a whiskey called Whiskey in the Wild. It's my own. I own a golf course I'm part of EA Sports,I'm part of golf, you know, building golf greens. And an opportunity came up about a year, a little over a year ago, seeing what's happening in the world today in the industry, [00:09:00] especially of tech and the different sectors of healthcare and just being a part of technology today, um, to do a blockchain technology. Blockchain is new to the game. It's obviously, it's been around for a few years, but nobody's really tested the accuracy or has really challenged how great blockchain can actually be for data storage, for the movement of data.
We've seen a lot of things happen in the healthcare industry these days with bad actors, with companies getting hacked, they're holding up their businesses for ransom. You know, United Healthcare they have millions and millions and millions and millions of people that literally are handcuffed and you can't do anything as in terms of running a business or protecting these people.
So, it was an awesome idea and it's an awesome mentality because with the ever changing world of tech and what it can do and its powers and the things that are making [00:10:00]things faster and safer. These are the technologies that all companies are gonna be moving to.
Everybody says, well, technology scares everybody . And that istrue. But there is no question in my mind that the healthcare world, the processing world, a lot of the world is going to be moving to blockchain to store their very important data. The cloud-based system that everybody's on now has been compromised.
We have seen that over and over and over again. The bad players in the world and these scammers can now get into that cloud base and pretty much hold an entire industry captive and with a blockchain that is. Pretty much impossible to do. And so I was like, this is, this is a great place to be future technology. Our company, we are the top three best blockchain builders in the world. And we're, we are looking to change people's lives in healthcare , change the [00:11:00] security, change the way that healthcare does their business from day to day? Unfortunately there are a lot of hospital systems and a lot of the medical world are on archaic systems and seems like some of them are still on dial up.
I mean, that's how, just how old these systems are and not only does it take time to process the transferring of people's health records, but all these people are at risk of having their entire programs shut down and when we're dealing with as many people as we deal with today that are sick, that need attention, that need tobe in the best care at hand, we cannot afford to be shut down by bad actors.And you gotta do everything we can to protect people's data, protect the system, even more so give your healthcare records back to where they should be and where they should belong.
And that's with the patient. Each person should own their own healthcare records. It shouldn't be sitting in the cloud with, with all the other people on the archaic medical [00:12:00] data field.
Kip Theno: Yeah.Well, and I'm gonna double down on that 'cause our listeners obviously are all in healthcare, right?
I think hopefully there's a lot of hockey fans too. Blockchain maybe not so much. Our company, SamaCare, JR we're still dealing in a digital world that still uses faxes in 2025, but that you brought up like, look, X got hit last week with a massive attack and they've got military grade protection.That United Health subsidiary and then impacted Change Healthcare. It impacted all the clinics. The GPOs, yep. Impacted 190 million people. It's a third ofAmericans, and actually the cost was about $3 billion.
So I guess let's go to the home run question. I think the bad actors are getting better. That's a part of it. Technology's getting better. The cloud-based technology's not getting better from a protective standpoint. So if blockchain, if MediChainX as an example, your company using blockchain, would that have been much harder or impossible for that breach to happen?
Jeremy Roenick: It would, it would be almost be impossible.
Now listen, with blockchain, the way blockchain is built and it says [00:13:00] chain, right? So when you say blockchain, all the information goes on a chain where each chain is its own individual link to that person or to that, that data piece, it's not connected to anything else. The crazy thing about cloud base is when all the information is getting stored in a database for a company, allt hat data goes into a cloud and it's all amongst each other. So if a bad actor gets in and compromises that cloud, it can get all the information off of that cloud. Everything is susceptible. Whereas in a blockchain, a bad actor might be able to get into a chain. It'll only get into that one piece of data, and there might be billions and billions of chains on that, on that chain of data.
So it's really not beneficial for a bad actor to go in and only have one person's information.So to get the part of the whole chain is virtually impossible. So when you talk about protecting your [00:14:00] data and making sure that data is stored in a safe place, can get transferred from one place to another, extremely fast and safe.
You'll be able to control the payment rails from the patient to the provider, from the provider, to the employee, from the insurance company to the provider. It's the amount of speed and accuracy. That you can do not to mention the size of payments that can be made on a blockchain.
It is the best way and the most productive way to store and transfer data all around the world because it's borderless transfer.
Wouldn't it be nice that if we all had our own medical number, blockchain number, and anywhere we go in the world and something happens and you have to go to a doctor, you have to goto a hospital and they ask you what your medical number is, and they can pull up your entire health history right there at a speed second time, you don't have to reach back to your provider back home or call your physician back home to get your [00:15:00] data records. You literally own them and you can transfer them. All over the world, you know, borderless. I mean, that becomes a very powerful key and instrument to have when you're talking about taking care and getting the speediest mo best care possible, and nobody can access that without permission from you.
That is a very important part , of the world, protecting your own information and making it easier for the hospitals to really, to collect, to maneuver through, and to do a lot of the processing that happens throughout the medical world. There's too many levels and too many variables that come into the way that it's done now, where mistakes can happen.
We talked about the data breaches. That can happen. The blockchain will take away 95/96% of all of those problems in a second.
Kip Theno: Yeah. I mean, you think about those data breaches, we're talking about huge organizations, Metadata as an example, and then you just actually brought it down to the patient level.
And look, you're a [00:16:00] patient.I'm a patient, I have no idea where my data is. I have no idea how to control it, where the command and control is. So you guys over there have figured out a way to have the patient have control in line of sight. So walk us through patients, how did they, how easy is it for them to use this technology to then feel very confident they can access their, their information and it's protected all, all day long?
Jeremy Roenick: Yeah.And that, I think that's the scariest thing for everybody, right? Because everything is technology and if you're not a tech person and you don't have very good skills in maneuvering through apps and through all that kind of stuff, it can get a little bit tricky.
But, it simply is the front end dashboard. A lot of these companies will be able to sign up onto the blockchain. Each individual member and patient would enter into that front end. Just like being in an app. And once you go into that app, you're gonna have to sign up and at that sign up, you'll be given your blockchain number.
And that blockchain number is then connected to all of your information once the medical field moves [00:17:00]all that information into your personal profile. So, again, it's like signing up for an app. But, with a few more steps that it walks you right through .
In the late eighties, early nineties, we had information sitting in cabinet drawers. We had to move all that information from paper information onto a computer, and then from the computer with on disk drives then we had to move to the cloud base. So technology is a scary thing, but it gets easier and better and faster as it goes. And it's a process. It wouldn't be a process that would happen overnight. It would be a gradual build from an organization. But, it's gonna happen.
It's not gonna be an "if" blockchain is gonna be used, it's a "when". And the companies that do get on board with blockchain earlier now are gonna have so much more once everybody else starts going over. They're not gonna even have a bleep in their day-to-day business dealings.
And the amount of money [00:18:00]that they can save because of the transactions fees that happen. There's so many benefits to it. So yeah, it would be a little bit difficult. People have to learn it, but I know people who didn't know how to text and now they're sending emails and texts and I know people that didn't know how to get ontoFacebook. People adapt and they'll justhave to adapt to this, to the best protection in data.
And that's blockchain.
Kip Theno: Well, I'm interested in this quote unquote, I'm gonna use the term power play because you mentioned two things there that I think are significant. One is, look, we have the accumulated knowledge of all of mankind in the palm of our hand with a cellphone. Right. And I think people are more savvy than maybe we give them credit for, in healthcare for apps and utilizing remote patient monitoring, and being educated by their clinics. But then there's the other side, there's the large entity, so the healthcare systems, they're still on these antiquated protection platforms. You've got the revenue cycle management companies. You have the, the payers, the insurers, right? Yep. There's a lot of inertia that can happen trying to get those big entities to [00:19:00]change and be the tip of the sword.
For a company like you guys in MediChainX and utilizing blockchain, what's the power play there for you all in the strategy?
Jeremy Roenick: Well, it's obviously, it's the accuracy of everything, right? And it's getting it out there in in medical it's very tricky 'cause everything has to be HIPAA compliant.
So, making sure everything is HIPAA compliant through the process of building the blockchain becomes very, very important. Accuracy, speed, and making sure that the entire informational highway that happens through healthcare. Uh, we do the same thing in processing, credit card processing.
There are steps to doing everything. There are steps for a patient to walk into the to clinic, you know, go get the service. And where that data goes, where that information goes. You know, you have people that are going to pharmacies to get their prescriptions, you know, all that stuff has to be put under the blockchain. So the size and scope is crazy, but the "pay attention to detail" --that's [00:20:00] always the case for us. So we've done a tremendous amount of work and information diving and finding out everything that needs to happen for different industries, because healthcare, whether you're a healthcare company, you're gonna have different processes than a medical establishment than a hospital will. So, it's like I said, it's a big lift, but it's, like I said, we're one of the top three blockchain builders in the world. And, time's on our side. We're beating the trend right now.
So we're in front of everybody.
Kip Theno: Your, your tip of the sword and trailblazers are, you know, they often go through those pains, right? But I think it's also awareness. Look after talking to you a bunch of times on this, I can only find a couple. I mean, there's, there's a humanity protocol for digital identity verification.
There's another company that uses blockchain to protect industrial operations. Security. Yep. I had a hard time finding any competition in healthcare. Now competition is good for everybody and raises awareness. But are you guys like the first or are there others and, and what sets you apart?
Jeremy Roenick: No, there's others that have built the blockchain, but it becomes very important [00:21:00] how you start your business and I think what the early people that went to the blockchain, they made mistakes that made it very difficult. They went the one by one aspect, trying to sign one person up, another person up another person up. The best way that you can go about building a blockchain and making sure you have the big biggest success is acquiring the right partners to jump on board to start the process with you. So it's, it's kind of starting from the top up, right? Getting a company, let's say like UnitedHealthcare that has 300 million customers. Right there allows you to build a blockchain and have instant success as a company. 'Cause to just go the one by ones piece by piece, a will be way too long and two, it'll be way too difficult and frustrating.
So that's kind of the thesis and mentality. 'Cause everybody's gonna be going to blockchain, there's no question about it. You're gonna see more and more hack, more and [00:22:00] more companies that are gonna be put out of business. If not put out of business.
They're going to lose millions and millions of dollars while their systems are shut down. The blockchain will prevent all of that. And again, new technology always. Always wins off of old technology. It's just like death and taxes. That's a sure thing in the world.
There's no question that new technology will always outpace old technology.
Kip Theno: Well, it's like the old 20 pound wooden co-host sticks you and I used to use versus the carbon fiber, you know, hyper lights that are out there today. Right?
Jeremy Roenick: Exactly right. Exactly. Yeah. You don't see anybody today using good oldSherwood wood sticks anymore.
Kip Theno: No, no, we should go back to that. You know, there's something about it, but I think it's also taking notice, like these, these massive attacks and breaches are, are making people kind of sit up higher in their chair. By the way, I had a chance to talk to your technology team. The way that they're gonna be integrating, their APIs to EMRs and HR is gonna make this easier.
Not gonna be a massive headache, but definitely I think a [00:23:00] change in mindset. So we want to get it out there JR.
I've got a couple Easter egg questions for you, but before we do that. For MediChainX and yourself, how can payers and companies and healthcare systems, and really anybody that's interested in this new technology reach you guys, what's the contact they should be looking for?
Jeremy Roenick: Uh,so, you can go to MediChainX.io. We're forever expanding our website and building our website. That's pretty much where you would go. Go on Google and read a bunch about us. Um, there are, there are contact information on Google.
We've worked so hard on building the blockchains and building the information that the one thing that is the last to come, which should be one of the first is our website.
But, definitely go to MediChainX.io.
Kip Theno: We'll doit and we're gonna get it out there in the masses. So, JR a couple Easter egg questions, and I know some of your mates, old mates might be listening to this. I don't want you to, you know, do anything that'll get you in trouble. But who was the toughest player you ever played against and who was the best all around hockey player that you remember playing [00:24:00] against?
Jeremy Roenick: Well, the toughest, I mean, toughest in, there's two different kinds of tough, there's tough fighting and then there's tough just, just all around tough, physically tough, mentally tough, you know, dirty, tough. Mark Messier was the toughest person that I had to play against his mentality. He would hurt you, he would hit you, he would slash you, he would score goals against you.
And it was just so frustrating to play against somebody like that. As far as the best, you know, everybody talks about know Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky, Messier I throw up in there, Peter Forsberg, I throw up in there, Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman, I mean, I played in the best generation in the history of hockey from 1988 until 2003 when Gretz and Mario retired.
The amount of talent that played in the nineties is unimaginable. And, I was fortunate enough to play in that time. But, Mario, for me still, he [00:25:00] would've, if he would've stayed healthy and didn't get sick, and I think, he would've broke the goals records that Ovechkin's getting ready to break. But who would've thought, who would've thought anybody would break, Wayne Gretzky's record, but looks like Ovie's gonna do it. Maybe not this year, but soon, which is one of the most unbelievable achievements in pro sports.
Kip Theno: Yeah, heis like seven or eight away.
That's gonna be crazy. But you know, records are made to be broken and he played in that great era. I'll never forget those Coyotes, RedWings playoffs games back in the nineties that those were awesome and I'll finish with this: my son, he's 14 u, he's a bantam playing.
We play the old Sega Genesis. You mentioned EA sports, right?He actually traded you from the Coyotes and you are now on a line in our Sega Genesis game with Yzerman and Fedorov, so I can't Oh boy. Look out. It's not
Jeremy Roenick: fair.That's an unbeatable line. You know, it's not so much me, it's Roenick
he's good.
Kip Theno: Well, listen, we appreciate you being on the Road to Care podcast. Everybody out there get in touch with MediChainX. We're gonna get this out. And JR thank youso much and congratulations on a wonderful career in a transition to innovating[00:26:00] Healthcare for everyone out there.Thanks, JR
Jeremy Roenick:thanks Kip. Appreciate it buddy.
Kip Theno: Thank you for joining the Road to Care podcast, hosted by SamaCare, the leader in prior authorization technology and services, where through a script to therapy operating system, we enable connectivity with clinics, payers, and manufacturers focused on optimizing patient care. Tune in next time as together we can make things right.
Enjoy the music written, produced, and recorded by Jamestown.
Podcast produced by JFACTOR, visit https://www.jfactor.com/
Together, we can make healthcare right. Here are some of the outstanding healthcare organizations and associations championing patient health mentioned in this episode:
Kip Theno: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Road to Care podcast hosted by SamaCare, where we'll talk with key opinion leaders, physicians, administrators, manufacturers, venture capitalists, and legislators to get their insights on the state of healthcare today. And where we see it evolving SamaCare's prior authorization platform is free to clinics, ensuring patients get on the right therapy at the right time.
Together we can simply make things right.
All right, and we are live. And hey everybody. Welcome back to the Road to Care podcast hosted by SamaCare. And I am ready to drop the gloves because Jeremy Roenick is our special guest today, JR is a celebrated NHLAll-Star Hall of Famer, Olympic Athlete and Sports Icon. As one of the greatest and grittiest American-born hockey players of all time, and a sports commentator JR showed unparalleled commitment to both physical and mental resiliency. He brings that commitment to his new calling, which is helping healthcare achieve peak [00:01:00] performance.His company, MediChainX, leverages cutting edge blockchain technology to reshape the way medical data is handled and protected, paving the way for better care, stronger trust, and a more connected future.
So JR how are you man?
Jeremy Roenick: I'm doing great, Kip. Great to be on with you pal, this is awesome.
Kip Theno: Well, it's been a long time and I'm glad we reconnected now, selfishly, we do have to talk hockey a little bit and just for our subscribers and all the listeners out there, JR actually crushed my hopes and dreams when I was a Bantam and he was aBantam.
He was playing for a team called the New Jersey Rockets. I was playing for a team called the Indianapolis Bisons. Yep. Um, and in the national championships, I think this was the semifinals, your team beat us five to two, and you had a hat trick in that game, JR do you remember those, those games at all?
Jeremy Roenick: I do actually.
It was, well, it was two, two, my favorite years of playing hockey, my two bantam years where we won back to back national championships.But um, I [00:02:00] remember that team, theIndianapolis Bisons. I don't remember the game or the goals, but I do remember that whole experience of going through the national championships and through the tournament.
And I know the first one I had separated my shoulder in the quarter final game, I had to play two games with a totally separated shoulder, and the final, the final against the Chicago young Americans went six overtimes until, I had two goals and assists that in that final game, which gave me my first real taste of, of being a champion.
And I just, I just loved it.
Kip Theno: Yeah.Shocking that you had that many goals, but, so I, I do, by the way. It's okay that you don't remember me. That's fine. I'm not hurt by it. But I remember watching the back of your jersey literally for three periods and it was just a pleasure and I'll, I'll never forget those days.
And by the way, so you won those two national championships ,and just for the listeners out there, this doesn't happen very often today and it actually didn't happen very often in the 80's, when JR you were put into theNHL, I think Steve [00:03:00] Yzerman went in right outta high school, outta juniors, you won two national championships and then to the NHL outta high school.
What was that like ?
Jeremy Roenick: It was crazy. 'cause I, it, it was my bantam year was my second bantam year was my freshman year and literally, I bet you I weighed 140 pounds in my freshman yea rand two years later I turned pro and walked onto an NHL, arena surface to playin the NHL.
So it's a, it was a very, very fast track from Bantam to high school, right to the NHL, which I don't think many people have been able to do that route. But, uh, I was fortunate enough to get done.
Kip Theno: He did.And then after that, I it's in the history books, right? You were 20 seasons, I think five teams here.
A couple statistical questions for you. I'm sure you can rattle these off, but I might have a surprise for you, JR so how many goals did you end up with in your career?
Jeremy Roenick: 513regular season?
Kip Theno: Yep. And ,and, and your 500th was with San Jose. Do you remember that goal?
Jeremy Roenick: Yep.It was the best dump in. That I've ever had.
It was a ring, [00:04:00] uh, shot around the glass that hit the partition, redirected towards the net. The goaltender had come out to try to corral the puck and got caught out of position. And then as he scurried back to the front, the puck was going in the net. He kind of slapped, stick the puck a little bit and actually threw it into his own net.
So, so since I was the last. The last opposing team player to touch the puck. I got the goal. That's how my 500th goal went in.
Kip Theno: Well, congrats man. Five 13, that's a story for you. Five. 5
Jeremy Roenick: 0 1was a beauty. It was a, it was a snapshot lace, top shelf, far corner. It was a thing of beauty. So, um, I made up for it. The next goal,
Kip Theno: you had a wicked shot, but my favorite of you is you would always go, wheels around left side, come in that sweet, left to right, deke move.
Goalies were just statues at that point. Yeah,
Jeremy Roenick: we called it, uh, we called it the bean pot. Come in, take a little move to the left, hammer on the brakes and throw it into an empty net. So we see it a little bit more today, but you didn't see it too often back in the the eighties and nineties.
Kip Theno: No, not a lot from [00:05:00] you. I think those kids today are obviously watching film of you and then assist you remember how many assists you ended up with.
Jeremy Roenick: I had703 assists for 1,216 total points. I think it was like 1,530 games and over1500 minutes of penalties, which you gotta be a little bit excited about also.
Kip Theno: I'm excited, and that's where I was going. You actually took the penalty minutes because if you, if we do some potato math, that's actually 731 or over about740 actual penalties, probably not including the five minute majors and the misconducts, but you've got a great story. You know, there's always mentors and coaches throughout the career.
I think we've all had 'em. You certainly had 'em where when you went to the NHL, like you said, you were a buck 40 soaking wet playing against these monsters. And, Coach Mike Keenan, who was a badass. He was a tough coach.Ooh. Was he ever did something with you to change your game, to earn all those penalty minutes, by the way, do you remember that story?
Jeremy Roenick: Yeah.Well, he, well, I wasn't, I wasn't a tough player. I wasn't a physical player.I was just a finesse, skate as fast as I can and scored as many goals. But going [00:06:00] to Chicago at the time, MikeKeenan was coming from Philly, they had that, you know, that broadstreet bully mentality. He wanted to have a tough, physical, very mean hockey team.
And that just wasn't my style. And in my first preseason game,I'm flying around, you know, going past checks, swinging by other players, wouldn't finish my checks. And Keenan's like, "Nope, this is not gonna fly with me." And he came down to the bench and he grabbed me by the neck and literally choked me while screaming in my, into my face and said a lot of profanities and, you know, pretty much threatening my entire NHL existence on whether I was gonna finish my check and start hitting somebody. So, you know, I put on a pair of football pads, shoulder pads, and started, you know, turn myself into a human torpedo to please my coach.
And I found that, I really enjoyed hitting people hard. I really enjoyed the, you know, how it felt. I enjoyed getting hit. Um, and I found I enjoyed it and fans enjoyed it. So it became part of my, kind of, part of my repertoire, [00:07:00] which, I don't know if there's many players that have kind of combined the finesse goalscoring, playmaking fighting, hitting, you know, the total conglomerate that I had through 21 years.
Kip Theno: No, no. I mean that you're, you were the triple threat guy and I would imagine just that, just getting over that barrier of toughness to be able to go crush guys and not worry if they crushed you back that it, it probably elongated your career.Right? I.
Jeremy Roenick: I don't know whether it elongated my career.
Um, I was fortunate enough to play 21 years, so I was blessed with a durable body, took care of myself. And, one good thing that saved me isI did things properly. I was taught how to do it properly. I did it while protecting myself. And also, you know, even though I would look like I was out of control, like I was a little reckless.
I always, always seemed to have my body in the right place whenI was getting hit, and I always made sure that I hit with the most powerful part of my body. So I wasn't susceptible to injury. So I was, I, I think I did it in a, [00:08:00] in a very educated, smart way than just being a total, you know, psycho
Kip Theno: mental as you would say.
Thank you for the walk down memory Lane JR. So you listen the journey from NHL Hall of Famer toHealthcare Innovator. I certainly would've thought it would've been in dentistry or orthodontics.
That's talk. Talk to me about that.
Jeremy Roenick: Listen, if I was my own patient forever and I had a bunch of people just like me, I would definitely would be investing in the dental, in the dental side of healthcare. You know, it was kind of funny, I think being a professional athlete or being in the limelight or being around as many people as I have or just in general, I hate the word celebrity, but being in the public eye, you get a lot of opportunities to do things in many different industries.
I own a whiskey called Whiskey in the Wild. It's my own. I own a golf course I'm part of EA Sports,I'm part of golf, you know, building golf greens. And an opportunity came up about a year, a little over a year ago, seeing what's happening in the world today in the industry, [00:09:00] especially of tech and the different sectors of healthcare and just being a part of technology today, um, to do a blockchain technology. Blockchain is new to the game. It's obviously, it's been around for a few years, but nobody's really tested the accuracy or has really challenged how great blockchain can actually be for data storage, for the movement of data.
We've seen a lot of things happen in the healthcare industry these days with bad actors, with companies getting hacked, they're holding up their businesses for ransom. You know, United Healthcare they have millions and millions and millions and millions of people that literally are handcuffed and you can't do anything as in terms of running a business or protecting these people.
So, it was an awesome idea and it's an awesome mentality because with the ever changing world of tech and what it can do and its powers and the things that are making [00:10:00]things faster and safer. These are the technologies that all companies are gonna be moving to.
Everybody says, well, technology scares everybody . And that istrue. But there is no question in my mind that the healthcare world, the processing world, a lot of the world is going to be moving to blockchain to store their very important data. The cloud-based system that everybody's on now has been compromised.
We have seen that over and over and over again. The bad players in the world and these scammers can now get into that cloud base and pretty much hold an entire industry captive and with a blockchain that is. Pretty much impossible to do. And so I was like, this is, this is a great place to be future technology. Our company, we are the top three best blockchain builders in the world. And we're, we are looking to change people's lives in healthcare , change the [00:11:00] security, change the way that healthcare does their business from day to day? Unfortunately there are a lot of hospital systems and a lot of the medical world are on archaic systems and seems like some of them are still on dial up.
I mean, that's how, just how old these systems are and not only does it take time to process the transferring of people's health records, but all these people are at risk of having their entire programs shut down and when we're dealing with as many people as we deal with today that are sick, that need attention, that need tobe in the best care at hand, we cannot afford to be shut down by bad actors.And you gotta do everything we can to protect people's data, protect the system, even more so give your healthcare records back to where they should be and where they should belong.
And that's with the patient. Each person should own their own healthcare records. It shouldn't be sitting in the cloud with, with all the other people on the archaic medical [00:12:00] data field.
Kip Theno: Yeah.Well, and I'm gonna double down on that 'cause our listeners obviously are all in healthcare, right?
I think hopefully there's a lot of hockey fans too. Blockchain maybe not so much. Our company, SamaCare, JR we're still dealing in a digital world that still uses faxes in 2025, but that you brought up like, look, X got hit last week with a massive attack and they've got military grade protection.That United Health subsidiary and then impacted Change Healthcare. It impacted all the clinics. The GPOs, yep. Impacted 190 million people. It's a third ofAmericans, and actually the cost was about $3 billion.
So I guess let's go to the home run question. I think the bad actors are getting better. That's a part of it. Technology's getting better. The cloud-based technology's not getting better from a protective standpoint. So if blockchain, if MediChainX as an example, your company using blockchain, would that have been much harder or impossible for that breach to happen?
Jeremy Roenick: It would, it would be almost be impossible.
Now listen, with blockchain, the way blockchain is built and it says [00:13:00] chain, right? So when you say blockchain, all the information goes on a chain where each chain is its own individual link to that person or to that, that data piece, it's not connected to anything else. The crazy thing about cloud base is when all the information is getting stored in a database for a company, allt hat data goes into a cloud and it's all amongst each other. So if a bad actor gets in and compromises that cloud, it can get all the information off of that cloud. Everything is susceptible. Whereas in a blockchain, a bad actor might be able to get into a chain. It'll only get into that one piece of data, and there might be billions and billions of chains on that, on that chain of data.
So it's really not beneficial for a bad actor to go in and only have one person's information.So to get the part of the whole chain is virtually impossible. So when you talk about protecting your [00:14:00] data and making sure that data is stored in a safe place, can get transferred from one place to another, extremely fast and safe.
You'll be able to control the payment rails from the patient to the provider, from the provider, to the employee, from the insurance company to the provider. It's the amount of speed and accuracy. That you can do not to mention the size of payments that can be made on a blockchain.
It is the best way and the most productive way to store and transfer data all around the world because it's borderless transfer.
Wouldn't it be nice that if we all had our own medical number, blockchain number, and anywhere we go in the world and something happens and you have to go to a doctor, you have to goto a hospital and they ask you what your medical number is, and they can pull up your entire health history right there at a speed second time, you don't have to reach back to your provider back home or call your physician back home to get your [00:15:00] data records. You literally own them and you can transfer them. All over the world, you know, borderless. I mean, that becomes a very powerful key and instrument to have when you're talking about taking care and getting the speediest mo best care possible, and nobody can access that without permission from you.
That is a very important part , of the world, protecting your own information and making it easier for the hospitals to really, to collect, to maneuver through, and to do a lot of the processing that happens throughout the medical world. There's too many levels and too many variables that come into the way that it's done now, where mistakes can happen.
We talked about the data breaches. That can happen. The blockchain will take away 95/96% of all of those problems in a second.
Kip Theno: Yeah. I mean, you think about those data breaches, we're talking about huge organizations, Metadata as an example, and then you just actually brought it down to the patient level.
And look, you're a [00:16:00] patient.I'm a patient, I have no idea where my data is. I have no idea how to control it, where the command and control is. So you guys over there have figured out a way to have the patient have control in line of sight. So walk us through patients, how did they, how easy is it for them to use this technology to then feel very confident they can access their, their information and it's protected all, all day long?
Jeremy Roenick: Yeah.And that, I think that's the scariest thing for everybody, right? Because everything is technology and if you're not a tech person and you don't have very good skills in maneuvering through apps and through all that kind of stuff, it can get a little bit tricky.
But, it simply is the front end dashboard. A lot of these companies will be able to sign up onto the blockchain. Each individual member and patient would enter into that front end. Just like being in an app. And once you go into that app, you're gonna have to sign up and at that sign up, you'll be given your blockchain number.
And that blockchain number is then connected to all of your information once the medical field moves [00:17:00]all that information into your personal profile. So, again, it's like signing up for an app. But, with a few more steps that it walks you right through .
In the late eighties, early nineties, we had information sitting in cabinet drawers. We had to move all that information from paper information onto a computer, and then from the computer with on disk drives then we had to move to the cloud base. So technology is a scary thing, but it gets easier and better and faster as it goes. And it's a process. It wouldn't be a process that would happen overnight. It would be a gradual build from an organization. But, it's gonna happen.
It's not gonna be an "if" blockchain is gonna be used, it's a "when". And the companies that do get on board with blockchain earlier now are gonna have so much more once everybody else starts going over. They're not gonna even have a bleep in their day-to-day business dealings.
And the amount of money [00:18:00]that they can save because of the transactions fees that happen. There's so many benefits to it. So yeah, it would be a little bit difficult. People have to learn it, but I know people who didn't know how to text and now they're sending emails and texts and I know people that didn't know how to get ontoFacebook. People adapt and they'll justhave to adapt to this, to the best protection in data.
And that's blockchain.
Kip Theno: Well, I'm interested in this quote unquote, I'm gonna use the term power play because you mentioned two things there that I think are significant. One is, look, we have the accumulated knowledge of all of mankind in the palm of our hand with a cellphone. Right. And I think people are more savvy than maybe we give them credit for, in healthcare for apps and utilizing remote patient monitoring, and being educated by their clinics. But then there's the other side, there's the large entity, so the healthcare systems, they're still on these antiquated protection platforms. You've got the revenue cycle management companies. You have the, the payers, the insurers, right? Yep. There's a lot of inertia that can happen trying to get those big entities to [00:19:00]change and be the tip of the sword.
For a company like you guys in MediChainX and utilizing blockchain, what's the power play there for you all in the strategy?
Jeremy Roenick: Well, it's obviously, it's the accuracy of everything, right? And it's getting it out there in in medical it's very tricky 'cause everything has to be HIPAA compliant.
So, making sure everything is HIPAA compliant through the process of building the blockchain becomes very, very important. Accuracy, speed, and making sure that the entire informational highway that happens through healthcare. Uh, we do the same thing in processing, credit card processing.
There are steps to doing everything. There are steps for a patient to walk into the to clinic, you know, go get the service. And where that data goes, where that information goes. You know, you have people that are going to pharmacies to get their prescriptions, you know, all that stuff has to be put under the blockchain. So the size and scope is crazy, but the "pay attention to detail" --that's [00:20:00] always the case for us. So we've done a tremendous amount of work and information diving and finding out everything that needs to happen for different industries, because healthcare, whether you're a healthcare company, you're gonna have different processes than a medical establishment than a hospital will. So, it's like I said, it's a big lift, but it's, like I said, we're one of the top three blockchain builders in the world. And, time's on our side. We're beating the trend right now.
So we're in front of everybody.
Kip Theno: Your, your tip of the sword and trailblazers are, you know, they often go through those pains, right? But I think it's also awareness. Look after talking to you a bunch of times on this, I can only find a couple. I mean, there's, there's a humanity protocol for digital identity verification.
There's another company that uses blockchain to protect industrial operations. Security. Yep. I had a hard time finding any competition in healthcare. Now competition is good for everybody and raises awareness. But are you guys like the first or are there others and, and what sets you apart?
Jeremy Roenick: No, there's others that have built the blockchain, but it becomes very important [00:21:00] how you start your business and I think what the early people that went to the blockchain, they made mistakes that made it very difficult. They went the one by one aspect, trying to sign one person up, another person up another person up. The best way that you can go about building a blockchain and making sure you have the big biggest success is acquiring the right partners to jump on board to start the process with you. So it's, it's kind of starting from the top up, right? Getting a company, let's say like UnitedHealthcare that has 300 million customers. Right there allows you to build a blockchain and have instant success as a company. 'Cause to just go the one by ones piece by piece, a will be way too long and two, it'll be way too difficult and frustrating.
So that's kind of the thesis and mentality. 'Cause everybody's gonna be going to blockchain, there's no question about it. You're gonna see more and more hack, more and [00:22:00] more companies that are gonna be put out of business. If not put out of business.
They're going to lose millions and millions of dollars while their systems are shut down. The blockchain will prevent all of that. And again, new technology always. Always wins off of old technology. It's just like death and taxes. That's a sure thing in the world.
There's no question that new technology will always outpace old technology.
Kip Theno: Well, it's like the old 20 pound wooden co-host sticks you and I used to use versus the carbon fiber, you know, hyper lights that are out there today. Right?
Jeremy Roenick: Exactly right. Exactly. Yeah. You don't see anybody today using good oldSherwood wood sticks anymore.
Kip Theno: No, no, we should go back to that. You know, there's something about it, but I think it's also taking notice, like these, these massive attacks and breaches are, are making people kind of sit up higher in their chair. By the way, I had a chance to talk to your technology team. The way that they're gonna be integrating, their APIs to EMRs and HR is gonna make this easier.
Not gonna be a massive headache, but definitely I think a [00:23:00] change in mindset. So we want to get it out there JR.
I've got a couple Easter egg questions for you, but before we do that. For MediChainX and yourself, how can payers and companies and healthcare systems, and really anybody that's interested in this new technology reach you guys, what's the contact they should be looking for?
Jeremy Roenick: Uh,so, you can go to MediChainX.io. We're forever expanding our website and building our website. That's pretty much where you would go. Go on Google and read a bunch about us. Um, there are, there are contact information on Google.
We've worked so hard on building the blockchains and building the information that the one thing that is the last to come, which should be one of the first is our website.
But, definitely go to MediChainX.io.
Kip Theno: We'll doit and we're gonna get it out there in the masses. So, JR a couple Easter egg questions, and I know some of your mates, old mates might be listening to this. I don't want you to, you know, do anything that'll get you in trouble. But who was the toughest player you ever played against and who was the best all around hockey player that you remember playing [00:24:00] against?
Jeremy Roenick: Well, the toughest, I mean, toughest in, there's two different kinds of tough, there's tough fighting and then there's tough just, just all around tough, physically tough, mentally tough, you know, dirty, tough. Mark Messier was the toughest person that I had to play against his mentality. He would hurt you, he would hit you, he would slash you, he would score goals against you.
And it was just so frustrating to play against somebody like that. As far as the best, you know, everybody talks about know Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky, Messier I throw up in there, Peter Forsberg, I throw up in there, Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman, I mean, I played in the best generation in the history of hockey from 1988 until 2003 when Gretz and Mario retired.
The amount of talent that played in the nineties is unimaginable. And, I was fortunate enough to play in that time. But, Mario, for me still, he [00:25:00] would've, if he would've stayed healthy and didn't get sick, and I think, he would've broke the goals records that Ovechkin's getting ready to break. But who would've thought, who would've thought anybody would break, Wayne Gretzky's record, but looks like Ovie's gonna do it. Maybe not this year, but soon, which is one of the most unbelievable achievements in pro sports.
Kip Theno: Yeah, heis like seven or eight away.
That's gonna be crazy. But you know, records are made to be broken and he played in that great era. I'll never forget those Coyotes, RedWings playoffs games back in the nineties that those were awesome and I'll finish with this: my son, he's 14 u, he's a bantam playing.
We play the old Sega Genesis. You mentioned EA sports, right?He actually traded you from the Coyotes and you are now on a line in our Sega Genesis game with Yzerman and Fedorov, so I can't Oh boy. Look out. It's not
Jeremy Roenick: fair.That's an unbeatable line. You know, it's not so much me, it's Roenick
he's good.
Kip Theno: Well, listen, we appreciate you being on the Road to Care podcast. Everybody out there get in touch with MediChainX. We're gonna get this out. And JR thank youso much and congratulations on a wonderful career in a transition to innovating[00:26:00] Healthcare for everyone out there.Thanks, JR
Jeremy Roenick:thanks Kip. Appreciate it buddy.
Kip Theno: Thank you for joining the Road to Care podcast, hosted by SamaCare, the leader in prior authorization technology and services, where through a script to therapy operating system, we enable connectivity with clinics, payers, and manufacturers focused on optimizing patient care. Tune in next time as together we can make things right.
Enjoy the music written, produced, and recorded by Jamestown.
Podcast produced by JFACTOR, visit https://www.jfactor.com/
Together, we can make healthcare right. Here are some of the outstanding healthcare organizations and associations championing patient health mentioned in this episode:
Kip Theno: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Road to Care podcast hosted by SamaCare, where we'll talk with key opinion leaders, physicians, administrators, manufacturers, venture capitalists, and legislators to get their insights on the state of healthcare today. And where we see it evolving SamaCare's prior authorization platform is free to clinics, ensuring patients get on the right therapy at the right time.
Together we can simply make things right.
All right, and we are live. And hey everybody. Welcome back to the Road to Care podcast hosted by SamaCare. And I am ready to drop the gloves because Jeremy Roenick is our special guest today, JR is a celebrated NHLAll-Star Hall of Famer, Olympic Athlete and Sports Icon. As one of the greatest and grittiest American-born hockey players of all time, and a sports commentator JR showed unparalleled commitment to both physical and mental resiliency. He brings that commitment to his new calling, which is helping healthcare achieve peak [00:01:00] performance.His company, MediChainX, leverages cutting edge blockchain technology to reshape the way medical data is handled and protected, paving the way for better care, stronger trust, and a more connected future.
So JR how are you man?
Jeremy Roenick: I'm doing great, Kip. Great to be on with you pal, this is awesome.
Kip Theno: Well, it's been a long time and I'm glad we reconnected now, selfishly, we do have to talk hockey a little bit and just for our subscribers and all the listeners out there, JR actually crushed my hopes and dreams when I was a Bantam and he was aBantam.
He was playing for a team called the New Jersey Rockets. I was playing for a team called the Indianapolis Bisons. Yep. Um, and in the national championships, I think this was the semifinals, your team beat us five to two, and you had a hat trick in that game, JR do you remember those, those games at all?
Jeremy Roenick: I do actually.
It was, well, it was two, two, my favorite years of playing hockey, my two bantam years where we won back to back national championships.But um, I [00:02:00] remember that team, theIndianapolis Bisons. I don't remember the game or the goals, but I do remember that whole experience of going through the national championships and through the tournament.
And I know the first one I had separated my shoulder in the quarter final game, I had to play two games with a totally separated shoulder, and the final, the final against the Chicago young Americans went six overtimes until, I had two goals and assists that in that final game, which gave me my first real taste of, of being a champion.
And I just, I just loved it.
Kip Theno: Yeah.Shocking that you had that many goals, but, so I, I do, by the way. It's okay that you don't remember me. That's fine. I'm not hurt by it. But I remember watching the back of your jersey literally for three periods and it was just a pleasure and I'll, I'll never forget those days.
And by the way, so you won those two national championships ,and just for the listeners out there, this doesn't happen very often today and it actually didn't happen very often in the 80's, when JR you were put into theNHL, I think Steve [00:03:00] Yzerman went in right outta high school, outta juniors, you won two national championships and then to the NHL outta high school.
What was that like ?
Jeremy Roenick: It was crazy. 'cause I, it, it was my bantam year was my second bantam year was my freshman year and literally, I bet you I weighed 140 pounds in my freshman yea rand two years later I turned pro and walked onto an NHL, arena surface to playin the NHL.
So it's a, it was a very, very fast track from Bantam to high school, right to the NHL, which I don't think many people have been able to do that route. But, uh, I was fortunate enough to get done.
Kip Theno: He did.And then after that, I it's in the history books, right? You were 20 seasons, I think five teams here.
A couple statistical questions for you. I'm sure you can rattle these off, but I might have a surprise for you, JR so how many goals did you end up with in your career?
Jeremy Roenick: 513regular season?
Kip Theno: Yep. And ,and, and your 500th was with San Jose. Do you remember that goal?
Jeremy Roenick: Yep.It was the best dump in. That I've ever had.
It was a ring, [00:04:00] uh, shot around the glass that hit the partition, redirected towards the net. The goaltender had come out to try to corral the puck and got caught out of position. And then as he scurried back to the front, the puck was going in the net. He kind of slapped, stick the puck a little bit and actually threw it into his own net.
So, so since I was the last. The last opposing team player to touch the puck. I got the goal. That's how my 500th goal went in.
Kip Theno: Well, congrats man. Five 13, that's a story for you. Five. 5
Jeremy Roenick: 0 1was a beauty. It was a, it was a snapshot lace, top shelf, far corner. It was a thing of beauty. So, um, I made up for it. The next goal,
Kip Theno: you had a wicked shot, but my favorite of you is you would always go, wheels around left side, come in that sweet, left to right, deke move.
Goalies were just statues at that point. Yeah,
Jeremy Roenick: we called it, uh, we called it the bean pot. Come in, take a little move to the left, hammer on the brakes and throw it into an empty net. So we see it a little bit more today, but you didn't see it too often back in the the eighties and nineties.
Kip Theno: No, not a lot from [00:05:00] you. I think those kids today are obviously watching film of you and then assist you remember how many assists you ended up with.
Jeremy Roenick: I had703 assists for 1,216 total points. I think it was like 1,530 games and over1500 minutes of penalties, which you gotta be a little bit excited about also.
Kip Theno: I'm excited, and that's where I was going. You actually took the penalty minutes because if you, if we do some potato math, that's actually 731 or over about740 actual penalties, probably not including the five minute majors and the misconducts, but you've got a great story. You know, there's always mentors and coaches throughout the career.
I think we've all had 'em. You certainly had 'em where when you went to the NHL, like you said, you were a buck 40 soaking wet playing against these monsters. And, Coach Mike Keenan, who was a badass. He was a tough coach.Ooh. Was he ever did something with you to change your game, to earn all those penalty minutes, by the way, do you remember that story?
Jeremy Roenick: Yeah.Well, he, well, I wasn't, I wasn't a tough player. I wasn't a physical player.I was just a finesse, skate as fast as I can and scored as many goals. But going [00:06:00] to Chicago at the time, MikeKeenan was coming from Philly, they had that, you know, that broadstreet bully mentality. He wanted to have a tough, physical, very mean hockey team.
And that just wasn't my style. And in my first preseason game,I'm flying around, you know, going past checks, swinging by other players, wouldn't finish my checks. And Keenan's like, "Nope, this is not gonna fly with me." And he came down to the bench and he grabbed me by the neck and literally choked me while screaming in my, into my face and said a lot of profanities and, you know, pretty much threatening my entire NHL existence on whether I was gonna finish my check and start hitting somebody. So, you know, I put on a pair of football pads, shoulder pads, and started, you know, turn myself into a human torpedo to please my coach.
And I found that, I really enjoyed hitting people hard. I really enjoyed the, you know, how it felt. I enjoyed getting hit. Um, and I found I enjoyed it and fans enjoyed it. So it became part of my, kind of, part of my repertoire, [00:07:00] which, I don't know if there's many players that have kind of combined the finesse goalscoring, playmaking fighting, hitting, you know, the total conglomerate that I had through 21 years.
Kip Theno: No, no. I mean that you're, you were the triple threat guy and I would imagine just that, just getting over that barrier of toughness to be able to go crush guys and not worry if they crushed you back that it, it probably elongated your career.Right? I.
Jeremy Roenick: I don't know whether it elongated my career.
Um, I was fortunate enough to play 21 years, so I was blessed with a durable body, took care of myself. And, one good thing that saved me isI did things properly. I was taught how to do it properly. I did it while protecting myself. And also, you know, even though I would look like I was out of control, like I was a little reckless.
I always, always seemed to have my body in the right place whenI was getting hit, and I always made sure that I hit with the most powerful part of my body. So I wasn't susceptible to injury. So I was, I, I think I did it in a, [00:08:00] in a very educated, smart way than just being a total, you know, psycho
Kip Theno: mental as you would say.
Thank you for the walk down memory Lane JR. So you listen the journey from NHL Hall of Famer toHealthcare Innovator. I certainly would've thought it would've been in dentistry or orthodontics.
That's talk. Talk to me about that.
Jeremy Roenick: Listen, if I was my own patient forever and I had a bunch of people just like me, I would definitely would be investing in the dental, in the dental side of healthcare. You know, it was kind of funny, I think being a professional athlete or being in the limelight or being around as many people as I have or just in general, I hate the word celebrity, but being in the public eye, you get a lot of opportunities to do things in many different industries.
I own a whiskey called Whiskey in the Wild. It's my own. I own a golf course I'm part of EA Sports,I'm part of golf, you know, building golf greens. And an opportunity came up about a year, a little over a year ago, seeing what's happening in the world today in the industry, [00:09:00] especially of tech and the different sectors of healthcare and just being a part of technology today, um, to do a blockchain technology. Blockchain is new to the game. It's obviously, it's been around for a few years, but nobody's really tested the accuracy or has really challenged how great blockchain can actually be for data storage, for the movement of data.
We've seen a lot of things happen in the healthcare industry these days with bad actors, with companies getting hacked, they're holding up their businesses for ransom. You know, United Healthcare they have millions and millions and millions and millions of people that literally are handcuffed and you can't do anything as in terms of running a business or protecting these people.
So, it was an awesome idea and it's an awesome mentality because with the ever changing world of tech and what it can do and its powers and the things that are making [00:10:00]things faster and safer. These are the technologies that all companies are gonna be moving to.
Everybody says, well, technology scares everybody . And that istrue. But there is no question in my mind that the healthcare world, the processing world, a lot of the world is going to be moving to blockchain to store their very important data. The cloud-based system that everybody's on now has been compromised.
We have seen that over and over and over again. The bad players in the world and these scammers can now get into that cloud base and pretty much hold an entire industry captive and with a blockchain that is. Pretty much impossible to do. And so I was like, this is, this is a great place to be future technology. Our company, we are the top three best blockchain builders in the world. And we're, we are looking to change people's lives in healthcare , change the [00:11:00] security, change the way that healthcare does their business from day to day? Unfortunately there are a lot of hospital systems and a lot of the medical world are on archaic systems and seems like some of them are still on dial up.
I mean, that's how, just how old these systems are and not only does it take time to process the transferring of people's health records, but all these people are at risk of having their entire programs shut down and when we're dealing with as many people as we deal with today that are sick, that need attention, that need tobe in the best care at hand, we cannot afford to be shut down by bad actors.And you gotta do everything we can to protect people's data, protect the system, even more so give your healthcare records back to where they should be and where they should belong.
And that's with the patient. Each person should own their own healthcare records. It shouldn't be sitting in the cloud with, with all the other people on the archaic medical [00:12:00] data field.
Kip Theno: Yeah.Well, and I'm gonna double down on that 'cause our listeners obviously are all in healthcare, right?
I think hopefully there's a lot of hockey fans too. Blockchain maybe not so much. Our company, SamaCare, JR we're still dealing in a digital world that still uses faxes in 2025, but that you brought up like, look, X got hit last week with a massive attack and they've got military grade protection.That United Health subsidiary and then impacted Change Healthcare. It impacted all the clinics. The GPOs, yep. Impacted 190 million people. It's a third ofAmericans, and actually the cost was about $3 billion.
So I guess let's go to the home run question. I think the bad actors are getting better. That's a part of it. Technology's getting better. The cloud-based technology's not getting better from a protective standpoint. So if blockchain, if MediChainX as an example, your company using blockchain, would that have been much harder or impossible for that breach to happen?
Jeremy Roenick: It would, it would be almost be impossible.
Now listen, with blockchain, the way blockchain is built and it says [00:13:00] chain, right? So when you say blockchain, all the information goes on a chain where each chain is its own individual link to that person or to that, that data piece, it's not connected to anything else. The crazy thing about cloud base is when all the information is getting stored in a database for a company, allt hat data goes into a cloud and it's all amongst each other. So if a bad actor gets in and compromises that cloud, it can get all the information off of that cloud. Everything is susceptible. Whereas in a blockchain, a bad actor might be able to get into a chain. It'll only get into that one piece of data, and there might be billions and billions of chains on that, on that chain of data.
So it's really not beneficial for a bad actor to go in and only have one person's information.So to get the part of the whole chain is virtually impossible. So when you talk about protecting your [00:14:00] data and making sure that data is stored in a safe place, can get transferred from one place to another, extremely fast and safe.
You'll be able to control the payment rails from the patient to the provider, from the provider, to the employee, from the insurance company to the provider. It's the amount of speed and accuracy. That you can do not to mention the size of payments that can be made on a blockchain.
It is the best way and the most productive way to store and transfer data all around the world because it's borderless transfer.
Wouldn't it be nice that if we all had our own medical number, blockchain number, and anywhere we go in the world and something happens and you have to go to a doctor, you have to goto a hospital and they ask you what your medical number is, and they can pull up your entire health history right there at a speed second time, you don't have to reach back to your provider back home or call your physician back home to get your [00:15:00] data records. You literally own them and you can transfer them. All over the world, you know, borderless. I mean, that becomes a very powerful key and instrument to have when you're talking about taking care and getting the speediest mo best care possible, and nobody can access that without permission from you.
That is a very important part , of the world, protecting your own information and making it easier for the hospitals to really, to collect, to maneuver through, and to do a lot of the processing that happens throughout the medical world. There's too many levels and too many variables that come into the way that it's done now, where mistakes can happen.
We talked about the data breaches. That can happen. The blockchain will take away 95/96% of all of those problems in a second.
Kip Theno: Yeah. I mean, you think about those data breaches, we're talking about huge organizations, Metadata as an example, and then you just actually brought it down to the patient level.
And look, you're a [00:16:00] patient.I'm a patient, I have no idea where my data is. I have no idea how to control it, where the command and control is. So you guys over there have figured out a way to have the patient have control in line of sight. So walk us through patients, how did they, how easy is it for them to use this technology to then feel very confident they can access their, their information and it's protected all, all day long?
Jeremy Roenick: Yeah.And that, I think that's the scariest thing for everybody, right? Because everything is technology and if you're not a tech person and you don't have very good skills in maneuvering through apps and through all that kind of stuff, it can get a little bit tricky.
But, it simply is the front end dashboard. A lot of these companies will be able to sign up onto the blockchain. Each individual member and patient would enter into that front end. Just like being in an app. And once you go into that app, you're gonna have to sign up and at that sign up, you'll be given your blockchain number.
And that blockchain number is then connected to all of your information once the medical field moves [00:17:00]all that information into your personal profile. So, again, it's like signing up for an app. But, with a few more steps that it walks you right through .
In the late eighties, early nineties, we had information sitting in cabinet drawers. We had to move all that information from paper information onto a computer, and then from the computer with on disk drives then we had to move to the cloud base. So technology is a scary thing, but it gets easier and better and faster as it goes. And it's a process. It wouldn't be a process that would happen overnight. It would be a gradual build from an organization. But, it's gonna happen.
It's not gonna be an "if" blockchain is gonna be used, it's a "when". And the companies that do get on board with blockchain earlier now are gonna have so much more once everybody else starts going over. They're not gonna even have a bleep in their day-to-day business dealings.
And the amount of money [00:18:00]that they can save because of the transactions fees that happen. There's so many benefits to it. So yeah, it would be a little bit difficult. People have to learn it, but I know people who didn't know how to text and now they're sending emails and texts and I know people that didn't know how to get ontoFacebook. People adapt and they'll justhave to adapt to this, to the best protection in data.
And that's blockchain.
Kip Theno: Well, I'm interested in this quote unquote, I'm gonna use the term power play because you mentioned two things there that I think are significant. One is, look, we have the accumulated knowledge of all of mankind in the palm of our hand with a cellphone. Right. And I think people are more savvy than maybe we give them credit for, in healthcare for apps and utilizing remote patient monitoring, and being educated by their clinics. But then there's the other side, there's the large entity, so the healthcare systems, they're still on these antiquated protection platforms. You've got the revenue cycle management companies. You have the, the payers, the insurers, right? Yep. There's a lot of inertia that can happen trying to get those big entities to [00:19:00]change and be the tip of the sword.
For a company like you guys in MediChainX and utilizing blockchain, what's the power play there for you all in the strategy?
Jeremy Roenick: Well, it's obviously, it's the accuracy of everything, right? And it's getting it out there in in medical it's very tricky 'cause everything has to be HIPAA compliant.
So, making sure everything is HIPAA compliant through the process of building the blockchain becomes very, very important. Accuracy, speed, and making sure that the entire informational highway that happens through healthcare. Uh, we do the same thing in processing, credit card processing.
There are steps to doing everything. There are steps for a patient to walk into the to clinic, you know, go get the service. And where that data goes, where that information goes. You know, you have people that are going to pharmacies to get their prescriptions, you know, all that stuff has to be put under the blockchain. So the size and scope is crazy, but the "pay attention to detail" --that's [00:20:00] always the case for us. So we've done a tremendous amount of work and information diving and finding out everything that needs to happen for different industries, because healthcare, whether you're a healthcare company, you're gonna have different processes than a medical establishment than a hospital will. So, it's like I said, it's a big lift, but it's, like I said, we're one of the top three blockchain builders in the world. And, time's on our side. We're beating the trend right now.
So we're in front of everybody.
Kip Theno: Your, your tip of the sword and trailblazers are, you know, they often go through those pains, right? But I think it's also awareness. Look after talking to you a bunch of times on this, I can only find a couple. I mean, there's, there's a humanity protocol for digital identity verification.
There's another company that uses blockchain to protect industrial operations. Security. Yep. I had a hard time finding any competition in healthcare. Now competition is good for everybody and raises awareness. But are you guys like the first or are there others and, and what sets you apart?
Jeremy Roenick: No, there's others that have built the blockchain, but it becomes very important [00:21:00] how you start your business and I think what the early people that went to the blockchain, they made mistakes that made it very difficult. They went the one by one aspect, trying to sign one person up, another person up another person up. The best way that you can go about building a blockchain and making sure you have the big biggest success is acquiring the right partners to jump on board to start the process with you. So it's, it's kind of starting from the top up, right? Getting a company, let's say like UnitedHealthcare that has 300 million customers. Right there allows you to build a blockchain and have instant success as a company. 'Cause to just go the one by ones piece by piece, a will be way too long and two, it'll be way too difficult and frustrating.
So that's kind of the thesis and mentality. 'Cause everybody's gonna be going to blockchain, there's no question about it. You're gonna see more and more hack, more and [00:22:00] more companies that are gonna be put out of business. If not put out of business.
They're going to lose millions and millions of dollars while their systems are shut down. The blockchain will prevent all of that. And again, new technology always. Always wins off of old technology. It's just like death and taxes. That's a sure thing in the world.
There's no question that new technology will always outpace old technology.
Kip Theno: Well, it's like the old 20 pound wooden co-host sticks you and I used to use versus the carbon fiber, you know, hyper lights that are out there today. Right?
Jeremy Roenick: Exactly right. Exactly. Yeah. You don't see anybody today using good oldSherwood wood sticks anymore.
Kip Theno: No, no, we should go back to that. You know, there's something about it, but I think it's also taking notice, like these, these massive attacks and breaches are, are making people kind of sit up higher in their chair. By the way, I had a chance to talk to your technology team. The way that they're gonna be integrating, their APIs to EMRs and HR is gonna make this easier.
Not gonna be a massive headache, but definitely I think a [00:23:00] change in mindset. So we want to get it out there JR.
I've got a couple Easter egg questions for you, but before we do that. For MediChainX and yourself, how can payers and companies and healthcare systems, and really anybody that's interested in this new technology reach you guys, what's the contact they should be looking for?
Jeremy Roenick: Uh,so, you can go to MediChainX.io. We're forever expanding our website and building our website. That's pretty much where you would go. Go on Google and read a bunch about us. Um, there are, there are contact information on Google.
We've worked so hard on building the blockchains and building the information that the one thing that is the last to come, which should be one of the first is our website.
But, definitely go to MediChainX.io.
Kip Theno: We'll doit and we're gonna get it out there in the masses. So, JR a couple Easter egg questions, and I know some of your mates, old mates might be listening to this. I don't want you to, you know, do anything that'll get you in trouble. But who was the toughest player you ever played against and who was the best all around hockey player that you remember playing [00:24:00] against?
Jeremy Roenick: Well, the toughest, I mean, toughest in, there's two different kinds of tough, there's tough fighting and then there's tough just, just all around tough, physically tough, mentally tough, you know, dirty, tough. Mark Messier was the toughest person that I had to play against his mentality. He would hurt you, he would hit you, he would slash you, he would score goals against you.
And it was just so frustrating to play against somebody like that. As far as the best, you know, everybody talks about know Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky, Messier I throw up in there, Peter Forsberg, I throw up in there, Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman, I mean, I played in the best generation in the history of hockey from 1988 until 2003 when Gretz and Mario retired.
The amount of talent that played in the nineties is unimaginable. And, I was fortunate enough to play in that time. But, Mario, for me still, he [00:25:00] would've, if he would've stayed healthy and didn't get sick, and I think, he would've broke the goals records that Ovechkin's getting ready to break. But who would've thought, who would've thought anybody would break, Wayne Gretzky's record, but looks like Ovie's gonna do it. Maybe not this year, but soon, which is one of the most unbelievable achievements in pro sports.
Kip Theno: Yeah, heis like seven or eight away.
That's gonna be crazy. But you know, records are made to be broken and he played in that great era. I'll never forget those Coyotes, RedWings playoffs games back in the nineties that those were awesome and I'll finish with this: my son, he's 14 u, he's a bantam playing.
We play the old Sega Genesis. You mentioned EA sports, right?He actually traded you from the Coyotes and you are now on a line in our Sega Genesis game with Yzerman and Fedorov, so I can't Oh boy. Look out. It's not
Jeremy Roenick: fair.That's an unbeatable line. You know, it's not so much me, it's Roenick
he's good.
Kip Theno: Well, listen, we appreciate you being on the Road to Care podcast. Everybody out there get in touch with MediChainX. We're gonna get this out. And JR thank youso much and congratulations on a wonderful career in a transition to innovating[00:26:00] Healthcare for everyone out there.Thanks, JR
Jeremy Roenick:thanks Kip. Appreciate it buddy.
Kip Theno: Thank you for joining the Road to Care podcast, hosted by SamaCare, the leader in prior authorization technology and services, where through a script to therapy operating system, we enable connectivity with clinics, payers, and manufacturers focused on optimizing patient care. Tune in next time as together we can make things right.
Enjoy the music written, produced, and recorded by Jamestown.
Podcast produced by JFACTOR, visit https://www.jfactor.com/
Together, we can make healthcare right. Here are some of the outstanding healthcare organizations and associations championing patient health mentioned in this episode:
