Apervita Inc., a Chicago-based company that is working to create a cloud-based platform and marketplace for sharing health analytics and data, has added Johns Hopkins Medicine to its network.
Health systems will be able to access and deploy a library of Johns Hopkins health innovations to improve patient outcomes, Apervita said.
Johns Hopkins has developed advanced screening, assessment and predictive models that empower health professionals to leverage patient data to anticipate and even preempt poor health outcomes. Examples include models for predicting the early onset of infection, screening to identify populations that will require intensive use of health services, and predictors of cancer stage and probability of recurrence.
Other members of the community include Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Leapfrog Group, and the University of Michigan.
Earlier this year Healthcare Informatics named Apervita one of its “Up and Coming” companies to watch for 2015. At the time, Apervita CEO Paul Magelli explained the rationale for the company as well as the business model.
Magelli noted that Cleveland Clinic does around 500 analytics a year as an institution and commercializes exactly one. “It takes them a few years and a couple of million dollars and that is a highly ineffective process,” he said. So Apervita came up with the idea of a community and a marketplace. It is seeking to allow institutions that demonstrate the value of analytics in a clinical setting to unlock that learning and allow others to subscribe to it. When it publishes its analytics solution, the publisher takes a majority of the revenue, with Apervita taking a small commission. “It is a little like the Amazon Kindle model,” Magelli explained. Amazon allows you to self-publish a book and you retain the rights. It is just a digital distribution channel that takes a commission.”
Apervita provides a cloud-based service. A customer organization routes the data to the cloud; it runs the computation and returns the result into the workflow where the clinician needs it. So another way Apervita makes money is from organizations that want to scale their computational use. For instance, if a health plan wants to apply a set of financial analytics to 100 million members, that is going to cost it more than a small practice that wants to run it across a few hundred patient visits. “So we offer a subscription that is usage-based but allows the smallest single-provider practice to get started at very little cost and then scale for usage by large organizations,” he said.
In January 2015 Apervita completed an $18 million Series A round of funding led by GE Ventures and Baird Capital to expand both the platform and its sales and marketing team.
