Cyprus hospitals adopt award winning blockchain app Aria

YGIA Polyclinic is the latest hospital to adopt the award-winning Aria blockchain app, in order to offer their patients unprecedented access and management of their medical records.

The ‘Aria Patient’ app allows citizens to receive and understand their laboratory results in minutes, from home. Using Blockchain technology, it enables complete privacy of such personal data, ensuring only patients can view and permit access for others to see their results.

“This is just the first step on our journey towards empowering our patients to have better access to their health and in enabling the benefits of digital health,” said YGIA Polyclinic IT and Risk Manager Savvas Zeidan.

For her part, Aria Health CEO Georgina Kyriakoudes elaborated that: “by using blockchain technology, we set a foundation for radical transparency and to enable patients to truly own their medical data.

“This technology will enable an exciting future of connected health and medical innovations,” she continued, adding: “the medical institutions using it will certainly lead the future of health.”

A vision realised

The European Commission have outlined three eHealth priorities:

1. Citizens’ secure access to their health data, including across borders
2. Personalised medicine via shared European data infrastructure
3. Citizen empowerment with digital tools for user feedback and person-centred care

So far, this has been difficult to achieve due to regulatory barriers and data privacy and security concerns. Healthcare data is 10x more valuable than a credit card on the black market, and most often stolen by hackers, with privacy breaches and illegal data sales increasing significantly during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, blockchain has been recognised internationally as a unique solution. It allows data to be unified, but makes it near impossible to be accessed without the explicit permission of the patient. It provides a patient-centric solution for unified access to secure, compliant and reliable medical data.

Yet, most advances of the technology in this space have been at a theoretical and research level – until Aria.

With its first release in the American Medical Centre (AHI) and co-funded by the European Union and the Republic of Cyprus through the Research and Innovation Foundation, the Aria solution realises this vision and for the first time enables patients a user-friendly way to experience the benefits of the technology while taking better take care of their, and their loved ones’ health.

YGIA Polyclinic and Aria partnership

YGIA Polyclinic is Cyprus’ largest private hospital and committed to digital innovation and automation of procedures, which have the power to transform the patient experience and provide world-class service.

Aria Health, as an innovative SME certified by the Ministry of Finance, is supporting Cyprus’ mission to accelerate the island’s position as a global tech leader.

The app is available free in the App and Playstore, titled ‘Aria Patient’; patients of these hospitals can request their records remotely and instantly.

It’s worth mentioning that, during its pilot period, over 200 patients began using Aria, with over 2,000 medical records sent. In the words of YGIA Polyclinic patient Tala, the app constitutes “the most practical and meaningful app I have on my phone”.