Innovator Awards: Apervita, Change Healthcare Recognized in the Vendor Space

In addition to pro­filing the inspiring innovation taking place across the provider and payer communities, throughout the past year, Healthcare Innovation has also collected submissions from leading technology solution companies as part of the vendor track of the Innovator Awards program. Several of these story submissions earned exclusive recognition in previous magazine issues, as well as in this current one. The excellent quality of the submissions that came in underscores the great importance of health IT vendor innovation across the healthcare ecosystem. As such, our editorial staff wants to thank all of the solution companies who submitted this year, and we are thrilled to publicize the two health IT vendor winners of the 2021 Innovator Awards Program, with brief descriptions of their transformative work.

Apervita: Leading Next Generation Healthcare Quality

The lack of efficiency in traditional quality measurement is estimated to cost physician practices and healthcare organizations more than $15.4 billion annually. The advent of Clinical Quality Language (CQL), an HL7 industry standard clinical logic expression language designed to support computable clinical logic for quality measures, clinical decision support and eCase reporting, provides a mechanism to standardized quality measures across the industry. The Joint Commission, the nation’s accreditation agency for health[1]care organizations (HCOs), believes in standardized quality measurement and was one of the fi­rst to leverage it to trans[1]form its operations.

The Joint Commission wanted to further empower their accredited hospitals and HCOs by adopting digital measures to provide more valuable and timely insights and reduce the required resources to do so. The agency leveraged the scalable environment of the Apervita Vital Platform and components of Apervita’s Quality Measurement Solutions to design the cloud-based Direct Data Submission Platform (DDSP), a cost-effective, efficient solution that enables the agency’s accredited HCOs to directly and quickly submit eCQM data, while empowering them with continuous performance insights to proactively manage quality improvement. The DDSP was created in a matter of months and enables HCOs to specify, develop, test, and execute digital measures/eCQMs, and create and distribute applications that use them, at scale and within a cloud environment.

With the DDSP, hospitals no longer have to send large copies of data through intermediary vendors to The Joint Commission. Instead, the DDSP, powered by Apervita, provides a streamlined mechanism to manage The Joint Commission’s annual quality requirements, at scale and on one platform. Once onboarded, hospitals upload their data to Apervita’s collaboration platform in a secure location controlled by each individual hospital. The data is uploaded in the same format required by CMS programs, alleviating the burden of creating two separate ­files. Hospitals then can review their data quality, execute quality measure logic, and view measurement results immediately. Once a hospital is ready to submit, results are available in near real[1]time to both The Joint Commission and the participating hospital.

The DDSP was introduced to The Joint Commission in 2018; within a year, over 1,000 HCOs were onboarded. As of today, there are over 3,200 HCOs using the submission platform. Previously, HCOs spent between $20,000-$50,000 annually on quality measurement tools to meet regulatory requirements for accreditation.

Change Healthcare: Transforming the Management of Imaging Data Storage and Accessibility

Enterprise imaging is at the heart of the hospital and is one of the richest data warehouses in the healthcare ecosystem. However, managing imaging data storage and accessibility has emerged as one of the largest concerns for health systems and imaging organizations. Conventional imaging storage practices that leverage on-premise vendor-neutral archives (VNAs) are costly to maintain and update, can leave imaging data vulnerable to security threats, and pose accessibility issues due to downtime and scalability limitations.

Change Healthcare has embarked on a journey to develop the only major cloud-native, fully-managed SaaS enterprise imaging offering called Change Healthcare Enterprise Imaging Network (EIN). During its development, the EIN team set three key objectives for this solution: enhance care, reduce cost and reduce complexity. EIN Viewer is a zero-footprint universal viewer for care team coordination and collaboration. It grants providers security-enabled access to patient information, images, and reports, at any time from any place, for fast, ef­cient communication and collaboration. EIN Analytics is built from the ground up to automate the collection and aggregation of large, complex data sets for the delivery of smart, actionable insights specifi­cally for imaging.

Meanwhile, with EIN, organizations are only paying for the storage that they are using. If data needs spike or dip, cloud[1]native storage can accommodate accordingly. Organizations no longer need to overprovision to account for a potential increase in data storage. Cloud-native technology reduces the time it takes to migrate storage solutions from several years to a mere matter of weeks by expand[1]ing the resources needed to migrate a large amount of data at ­rest and subsequently scaling back to only what is needed for ongoing operations.

What’s more, EIN seamlessly integrates with major EHR systems and can leverage HL7 and FHIR to integrate with other EHR systems as needed. Streamlined, cloud[1]native enterprise imaging also positively impacts cybersecurity. Change Healthcare has deployed this solution with healthcare organizations varying in size from large IDNs to small hospitals, and has been able to successfully ingest 1 million studies in one day from a single customer and deliver 13 upgrades with zero downtime.