The Government of Armenia Signs Strategic Partnership with WHISE-Embleema to Modernize Digital Healthcare Through Blockchain

• The Republic of Armenia Ministry of Health embraces national digital
  health agenda, partnering with WHISE-Embleema to digitize healthcare
  data in order to promote science research
• The adoption of blockchain technology and regulatory compliant
  bioinformatics has the potential to improve transparency, trust,
  patient safety and attract clinical research to Armenia
• Patients will benefit from access to real-time healthcare data to
  better inform research in high prevalence diseases areas, including
  cancer, hematological, immune system and endocrine disorders

YEREVAN, Armenia–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Government of the Republic of Armenia, today announced a partnership
with the WHISE-Embleema Consortium, an organization whose mission is to
accelerate the research and development of innovative new medical
treatments, by providing incentives for the use of health data through
patient ownership, via the exchange of proprietary data, and add value
through intellectual and analytic insights. The Consortium’s role is to
provide digital tools that enable patients and medical professionals to
build a holistic view of their health, to leverage this wealth of data
to accelerate medical research in the country.

In collaboration and under the guidance of the Ministry of Health, the
WHISE-Embleema Consortium has established a WHISE-Armenia non-for-profit
foundation. Armenian health officials led by Dr. Arsen Torosyan and
WHISE leadership have negotiated conditions that will permit the WHISE
Consortium and its affiliate members led by Dr. Prof. Vahan Simonyan to
audit existing digital and paper data ecosystems, to propose and
implement novel technologies for digital healthcare, and connect cohorts
with international research organizations. WHISE-Armenia will host a set
of integrated health data hubs, that will allow medical organizations to
integrate a variety of healthcare datasets, to secure patient privacy
and empower patients, doctors and clinical organizations to stay in
control of their data.

This partnership’s mission is to lay out a foundation for the collection
of trustworthy health data, built on blockchain technology and
regulatory HIVE analytics, to enable patient ownership of information
generated on their behalf, opt-in for pre-clinical or clinical research
by providing informed consent to accelerate information exchanges. This
will lead to the harmonization of the digital processes through
WHISE-Embleema protocols, to build up longitudinal datasets from
multiple hospitals and clinics in form of medical histories, genomes,
lab results, adverse event reports, insurance payments, and wellness
information from wearables.

“We welcome this project and are pleased to cooperate with
WHISE-Embleema Consortium. The Government of the Republic of Armenia and
the Ministry of Health are ready to support the Ecosystem Modernization
and Development Initiative in Armenia, which will increase productivity
of doctors, improve health facilities and patient’s social status. All
this implies a higher quality of data collection and its more accurate
analysis. As a result of the digitalization of health data, we expect
improvement of healthcare quality and decline in comorbidity,” said
Arsen Torosyan, Minister of Health of the Republic of Armenia.

The practical next step by the WHISE-Armenia foundation is to integrate
with institutions and care centers involved in building health data and
patient registries, namely from the Center of Medical Genetics and
Primary Healthcare, Oncology and Hematology Centers, as well as other
research and clinical facilities.

Data aggregated by the project will be marketized through the
WHISE-Armenia portal, so that industry partners may finance specific
research. The funds will be redistributed as a pay to patients, and
their physicians, as well as to clinics and hospitals to cover the gaps
in existing infrastructure, remodel and renovate hospital facilities,
purchase new laboratory equipment, and educate doctors and nurses for
clinical trial conduct. After patient cohorts of interests have been
allocated, WHISE-Embleema through its affiliate WHISE-Armenia will
attract clinical trials and satellite industries to Armenia. The first
round of operations will target such endemic conditions as oncology,
hematological, immune system and endocrine system diseases. Aggregated
data across healthcare providers is expected to generate value for other
disease areas of interest as time progresses.

Dr. Prof Vahan Simonyan, President of WHISE-Armenia and former Director
of Bioinformatics Research and Development at the U.S. Food & Drug
Administration (FDA) said: “We are excited and honored to receive this
endorsement from Armenia. Patient owned data can transform biomedical
research, allowing information generated in the process of care to
generate reliable, continuous real-world data regarding a medical
product’s benefit and risk profiles pre and post FDA market approval.
Faster, standardized real-world data in combination with genomic data
evidence that we intend to fund, will accelerate the availability of new
treatments and improve the safety and the discovery of new therapeutic
indications, some of which are endemic in Armenia. Armenia is one of the
oldest countries with a lot of hope and inspiration in its newly elected
democratic leadership. We are dedicated in this partnership and
investment into the country’s future to engage the leaders and
scientists to benefit patients in Armenia.”

Alexis Normand, Head of the Embleema Blockchain Consortium added: “We
are honored to participate in this strategic partnership with Armenia,
and we are convinced that this will bring significant benefits to
patients, by offering physicians better access to health data and
connect Armenia to international research, namely in oncology,
immunotherapy and molecular medicine. By streamlining the collection and
sharing of clinical information, while ensuring patient consent, we aim
to accelerate the development of new drugs and improve the real-world
data collection of marketed drugs.”

About WHISE-Embleema Consortium

The WHISE-Embleema Consortium has a noble, patient-centric mission: to
transfer ownership of health data to patients, commoditize the value of
information and analytical insights, accelerate information exchange,
and incentivize patients to opt-in to research. Patient owned data can
transform biomedical research, allowing information generated in the
process of care to generate reliable, continuous real-world data on a
medical product’s benefit and risk profiles pre and post FDA market
approval. Faster, standard real-world data and evidence will accelerate
the availability of new treatments and improve the safety and the
discovery of new therapeutic indications for existing FDA approved
products on the market.

About WHISE:

WHISE
(Wellness & Health Information Secure Exchange) is a result of
integration between distributed network of HIVE ecosystems and
Blockchain. High
Performance Virtual Environment (HIVE) is a hardware agnostic
distributed computing ecosystem optimized for the storage and analysis
of extra-large biomedical research and healthcare data. HIVE technology
is an open source, government and academia collaborative effort which
has multiple federal, academic and industry deployments addressing Big
Data needs across biomedical research enterprises. HIVE contains a tool
arsenal that addresses healthcare domains, such as clinical data
analysis and post-market surveillance, -omics (genomic, proteomic)
biomarkers, medical imaging and many others.

HIVE has been launched into Open
Source by FDA (efforts led by Dr. Vahan Simonyan) as a platform to
support end to end needs for big data and NGS analytics. Currently the
platform’s operations are sustained by US government funding as part of
a high performance analytics and data archival ecosystem authorized to
use in regulatory environment. HIVE Research and Development is
supported by US government in federal sector and by BlueHive
technology group in commercial sector.

For more information, please visit whise-global.com

About Embleema

Embleema
helps patients and pharma accelerate the availability of new treatments,
by fast-forwarding the exchange of data from the real world. It provides
a patient-driven healthcare blockchain network to allow patients to
share their consolidate health records securely. Hosted on a private
blockchain, Embleema’s consolidated, highly-secure repository provides
the healthcare ecosystem with an undisputed and holistic view of
patients’ medical history, while maintaining the patient’s data
sovereignty.

For more information, please visit www.embleema.com
and follow Embleema on Twitter @Embleema,
Telegram,
LinkedIn,
and Facebook.

Contacts

WHISE
Dr. Vahan Simonyan, PhD
+1 240-888-3570
(US)
[email protected]
Chief
Scientific Officer, Co-Founder, DNA-HIVE
President, Co-Founder
WHISE-Embleema
Professor of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics George
Washington University

Embleema
Alexis Normand
Embleema
+1 781-353-8949
(US)
[email protected]

Media (Europe)
Jean-François Kitten
[email protected]

Media (US)
Kimberly Ha
KKH Advisors
917-291-5744
[email protected]