Mayo Teams With Vendor to Ease Healthcare Measures Analysis

Data analytics platform vendor Apervita and Mayo Clinic are developing new software to turn healthcare measures into executable code that can be used to conduct data analytics. The goal is to create a self-service marketplace to gain more insight into the performance of measures.

These measures cover care quality, safety, finance, outcomes and any other measures an organization uses to assess performance, whether required by regulation or done for in-house purposes.

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“Healthcare providers and facilities should focus on what they do best, providing high quality patient care,” Jyotishman Pathak, PhD, a professor of biomedical informatics at Mayo, said in a statement. “With thousands of healthcare measures which continuously evolve, keeping track of, implementing and monitoring the measures has shifted some of that focus away from patients, and it needs to shift back.”

Measures are very specific and defined in a language that is not computer-executable, says Brad Ryan, chief commerce officer at Apervita. Someone developing an executable analytic must write in a programming language and then execute the code against variables in their data. Now, the goal is to have a more automated process to define measures and be able to import the non-computable language into executable form on the analytics platform.

A new editor program Apervita and Mayo are developing will use standard language to walk a user who doesn’t know how to write code through actually generating the code. Human readable definitions are then run through a compiler to turn it into Python code, which is a code specific to Apervita. An organization can use the code in-house, but also can share it if desired with other entities subscribing to it through the Apervita marketplace.

Web services to bring data on and off an analytics platform currently are widely available, says Ryan. What’s needed is web services to read, create, modify and export attributes for a quality measure.

Today, one or more individuals in an organization can define a measure to understand a specific performance level, but if they want to use the measure, they have to get a team to interpret measure definitions, and then develop and test the executable code, Ryan says. When the project with Mayo is complete, the measure will be on the analytics platform in executable form and already interpreted, developed and tested by the experts at Mayo.