Vareger: blockchain experts who see technology as a vital instrument

Vareger is the newest member of the Connected Health Cluster and sees technology as a vital instrument that needs to be wielded the right way for it to be truly beneficial. Years of close partnership with various international customers has built up an understanding of how to do this most efficiently.

Vareger has an office in Estonia (Tallinn) as well as Ukraine (Kiev) and the company offers software and product development for different customers in the areas of health, agriculture and other areas. Customers vary from new startups to large innovative corporations.

CEO Oleg Pun explains: “We offer an integral solution comprising everything from product development, implementation n to tech support. They especially enjoy taking part in developments with social implications – that help make peoples lives easier or more comfortable.”

Health care projects are one of the main areas of Vareger

Vareger offers health tech solutions to study habitual behaviour, peer-driven intervention projects, epidemics monitoring with privacy protocols, various solutions for maintenance teams, as well as mental health platforms. In addition, Vareger develops digital diaries, tools for medicinal data, coding and revenue cycle management systems. They also help with visualisation, analytics, data science components and security audits.

A good example would be the cooperation between Alliance for Public Health (USA) within the SyrEx solution. SyrEx is an open access software tool used in about 20 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia as well as in Middle East, South Asia and Africa. SyrEx aims to monitor customers, services and commodities in the framework of HIV prevention programmes. When it joined the project, Vareger was tasked with making the tool fast, cost effective and secure in terms of personal data protection. The team came up with a user friendly application that identifies the customer automatically without showing their personal data, while also helping employees collect information on those customers. Developing an AI prediction model in the mobile app was also of great importance as it served to identify at-risk HIV positive people.

Vareger brings out another important health project supported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (USA). It involves an AI-based platform focussed on behavioural studies and it contained programmes to detect infections and harm reduction.  More than 130,000 patients were tested over the course of three years, identifying 15,000 positive cases.

Due to the global challenges we are faced with today, they teamed up with the same partner to develop a solution for monitoring COVID-19 contacts in Ukraine. It is very similar to the Hoia app used in Estonia, the difference being that in Vareger’s app the doctors who receive the results are themselves responsible for determining the status of the patient.

Vareger also took part in the project GrandTime (Estonia), designed for the needs of the elderly, and developed a corresponding Android application. “It’s a video call app that is safe and extremely easy to use. Elderly people find modern technology complicated, meaning that the solution had to be suitable for people with no prior experience in using a smartphone or tablet computer. An important addition to this app is the option to permit automatic acceptance, which is an essential need when dealing with elderly people suffering from dementia,” said Oleg Pun about the solution.

Blockchain experts

Vareger’s expertise also includes a modern technology known as blockchain. Decentralised technologies (Blockchain, Public Key Infrastructure, Self-Sovereign identity, Decentralised Storage) establish a strong basis for reliable interaction between different parties to the digital world.

The implementation of such technologies means there is no longer a requirement for a moderator between the different parties as the rules are verified by a machine and not the state or other organisations. In addition, ruling out such an intermediary reduces costs in the long term,” says Mykhailo Tiutin, CTO of Vareger.

Vareger’s team believes that such technologies deserve more attention. “Blockchain is an infrastructure technology and we should naturally take into account that introducing such a technology is a very expensive and complex project for a company. There are two possible directions. The first option would be to integrate your processes into an existing and functioning blockchain solution, and the second would be to build an entire new ecosystem. The latter might be suitable for large corporations or even national organisations that are themselves creators of a market with decentralised parties, but in which the market does not trust that corporation, organisation or national structure as a relationship moderator. For example, such is the current situation in Ukraine where we are currently creating a national register based on blockchain technology,” adds Tiutin.

Since Vareger believes in the future of blockchain technology, they are constantly keeping tabs on any developments in the area and always follow the latest trends.

The team can list several projects using Vareger’s blockchain technology and not just in the area of health care.

For example, the real estate company Propy (USA) is among Vareger’s customers and through Propy Vareger created a blockchain-based real-estate registry MVP for the state of Vermont, and Propy was party to the first property transaction settled in cryptocurrency.

Oleg Pun also mentions the solution Platin (Israel) they created – one the one hand, Platin is a service package enabling location-based transactions with crypto assets, but it is also a mobile app and a motivation programme.

In addition, they are creating a blockchain-based document management system for a bank in Jordan.

Open for cooperation

“Vareger is always open to cooperation and new and interesting projects,” says Oleg Pun, specifying that this includes “creating the first MVPs for startups, and large development projects requiring coordination between different teams and partners and complex creative solutions. Reliability and abiding by promises are usually what we are praised and recommended for. We are happy to work with, create and develop new projects the same way with new partners.”