There are already thousands of health measures concerning quality, safety, outcomes, as well as finance that are increasingly the basis for measurement of performance and reimbursement for value-based care. The problem is that they are especially complex, and organizations struggle with the costly process of trying to implement and maintain them. Unfortunately, this often results in delays of as much as 12 months to report new measures or update existing measures.
The Mayo Clinic, a not-for-profit medical practice and medical research group which is the first and largest integrated not-for-profit medical group practice in the world and Apervita have teamed up in an effort to simplify this process and develop new software designed to turn healthcare measures into executable code that can be used to conduct data analytics. Analytics have become very important in this day and age, we have a ton of information, but if we cannot figure out what it means, then it is just meaningless gibberish.
Apervita is considered to be the leading health analytics and data community and marketplace. Their belief is that health professionals and enterprises have already created the greatest wealth of knowledge that has ever existed. Since the majority of this knowledge is paper-based or locked into proprietary systems, it is virtually impossible to use.
The goal of this collaboration is that Apervita will be able to offer a series of open interfaces, which will include open Web service APIs. This will allow for a great deal of manipulation of standard measure definitions, since they can be imported, edited, published, executed and exported. The company is already working on unlocking them, turning them into thousands of computable and shareable analytics and applying them to improve health.
In addition, once an author has developed a measure, it can be connected to various data sets, as well as be shared through a global marketplace. The Apervita platform can display the measure results or they can be accessed through APIs for display within electronic medical records (EMRs), third-party systems and mobile applications.
Apervita’s CEO, Paul Magelli, made the following comments, “There is already an abundance of health measures that support national, state and local objectives, but creating and deploying them can be a daunting task for any health enterprise. With this new capability, Apervita will serve as a platform for standard health measures, facilitating the distribution and execution of expertly developed and conveniently packaged measure sets. Apervita subscribers can conveniently browse measures and build their own measure sets, implementing them across their entire organization to monitor and improve performance. No more costly hours spent designing and coding health measures based on individual interpretations of a published standard. For the first time, the entire organization can concentrate on delivering performance excellence, while the development of standard measures are left to subject matter experts.”
The best way to accomplish any task, whether it is in the healthcare field or creating computer code, is to allow the experts to do what they are good at. Just as you would not want a programmer offering medical advice, it is a waste of time for medical personnel to analyze data.
Dr. Jyotishman Pathak Ph.D., professor of biomedical informatics at Mayo Clinic seems to agree when he said, “Healthcare providers and facilities should focus on what they do best, providing high quality patient care. After all, that’s what health care measures are designed to enable. With thousands of health care measures which continuously evolve, keeping track of, implementing and monitoring the measures has shifted some of that focus away from the patients, and it needs to shift back.”
Edited by
Dominick Sorrentino
