Apervita Creates Health Analytics for the Millions

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | January 9, 2015

I have often advocated for better integration of analytics into everyday medical practice, and I found a company called Apervita (originally named Pervasive Health) that jumps off in the right direction. Apervita, which announced a Series A round of funding on January 7, also has potential users outside of clinical settings. Pharma companies can use it to track adverse drug events, while payers can use it to predict fraud and risks to patients. There is not much public health data in the platform yet, but they’re working on it...

I got a demo of Apervita and found the administration pretty complex, but this seems to be a result of its focus on security and the many options it offers large enterprises to break staff into groups or teams. The bottom line is that Apervita compresses the difficult processes required to turn research into practice and offers them as steps performed through a Web interface or easy programming. Apervita claims to have shown that one intern can create as many as 50 health analytics in one week on their platform, working just from the articles in journals and web resources.

The platform encrypts web requests and is HIPAA-compliant. It can be displayed off-platform, and has been integrated with at least one EHR (OpenMRS). Always attuned to the technical difficulties of data use, I asked Halton how the users of Apervita analytics could make sure their data formats and types match the formats and types defined by the people who created the analytics. Halton said that the key was the recognition of different ontolgies, and the ability to translate between them using easy-to-create “codesets.”...

Halton heralds Apervita as a “community” for health care analytics for authors and providers. Not only can the creators of analytics share them, but providers can create dashboards or other tools of value to a wide range of colleagues, and share them. I believe that tools like Apervita can bridge the gap between the rare well-funded health clinic with the resources to develop tools, and the thousands of scattered institutions struggling to get the information that will provide better care.