Proof-of-concept for VA’s Digital Health Platform leverages analytics

The agency wants to unlock the value of data in disparate systems, says Apervita’s Paul Magelli.


Healthcare analytics vendor Apervita is participating in a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the viability of a Department of Veterans Affairs Digital Health Platform (DHP), designed to integrate veteran data from VA, military and commercial electronic health records—as well as apps, devices, and wearables— so that the information is available to providers in real time.

Managed by Georgia Tech, the VA proof-of-concept seeks to demonstrate the power of real-time analytics to deliver higher quality, more efficient and flexible care as part of the envisioned DHP architecture. The cloud-based platform is meant to create a new paradigm for the delivery of healthcare services with a modern, integrated system that incorporates best-in-class technologies and standards.

“DHP leverages a network of application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate military and commercial health data, while unifying VA’s data stores, connecting patient to provider in real-time, and predicting the most successful care to provide a better experience to the veteran,” according to a VA fact sheet.

Also See: VA lays out plans for cloud-based Digital Health Platform

A request for information released to industry in October 2016 by the VA described DHP, a public-private partnership, as a platform that “should enable real-time enterprise wide visibility into operations, patients, resources and analytics to eliminate waste, reduce latencies out of workflows, accelerate business processes, and maximize the use of assets and human resources.”

Apervita was selected for the proof-of-concept by Georgia Tech, the prime contractor working with the VA to demonstrate the real-time analytics component of the DHP architecture.

“Apervita is a cloud-based, real time health analytics and data platform,” says Paul Magelli, Apervita’s chief executive officer. “With DHP, the VA is looking to unlock the value of data currently housed in disparate systems across its organization, the Department of Defense and private care providers that it interacts with, and to begin to apply it throughout their care process.”

According to Magelli, DHP is a way for the VA to “open up what has classically been quite a closed architecture around existing systems.” He notes that Apervita’s platform will enable the agency to build analytics, integrate the data and then distribute the results of those analytics into the workflow.

“We think the cloud is essential for sharing and collaboration, a fundamental tool for achieving those aims,” adds Magelli. “This idea of openness, exchange and collaboration across the healthcare continuum represents the future.”

He says that Apervita and the proof-of-concept partners have so far demonstrated the ability to create and deploy complex medical pathways, integrate and execute them in real-time, and orchestrate the distribution of powerful insights across DHP components. In particular, analytics are critical to helping support informed decision-making in treating veterans, he contends.

The proof-of-concept will be completed early this year and be available for future demonstration of the effectiveness of DHP’s open API-based architecture, concludes Magelli. “That architecture is quite consistent with where we see the rest of the healthcare industry going, and the VA clearly has been a leader.”

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