Startups Filling Need for Analytics in Healthcare

Healthcare analytics are getting the call to support the industry through massive change, and new companies are hoping to fill gaps in technology and provide needed capabilities.

With the quick move to population health and accountable care, vendors are rushing to fill the need for analytics.

Existing healthcare IT vendors are boosting capabilities, and companies such as IBM Corp. and Xerox Corp. anticipate more opportunities. Existing analytics vendors, such as SAS and Tableau Software, are expanding capabilities to better meet needs in the healthcare industry.

Also See: Xerox Expands Health Analytics, Again

But new entrants are looking to meet specific needs. One such company is Chicago-based Apervita Inc.  Its founders implemented big data, analytics and secure infrastructure solutions in other industries before realizing the need to apply the same approach in healthcare to provide “an industry-scale executable knowledge platform and marketplace,” says CEO Paul Magelli. “Apervita was created to provide a single environment for health knowledge to be created, managed, exchanged and implemented.”

Apervita provides an open marketplace for health knowledge and data to be distributed among providers. “Sometimes, that can mean leading institutions like Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic and others can publish clinical best practices, and in some cases, that can mean progressive systems can share solutions to some critical piece of a common problem,” Magelli explains.

The company distributes clinical or analytic knowledge from these organizations, which get fees for licensing their material. For example, Apervita in late July reached an agreement with the University of Michigan to commercialize the university’s portfolio of medical algorithms, assessments and protocols.

The agreement will enable U-M clinicians and researchers to author and publish their research as computable analytics, which can be offered to any health enterprise through the Apervita marketplace. Initially, the university will focus sharing knowledge in the areas of cardiology, diabetes and wellness. For end users, the marketplace provides a way to access knowledge “in an executable and easily implementable way, and at a greatly reduced cost,” Magelli says.

MediVu, Melbourne, Fla., also is a new entrant in the healthcare market. The company uses visualization technology to present useful information in an easy-to-understand and retainable format. MediVu initially focused efforts on the display of clinical information, but has expanded offerings to meet emerging needs in the healthcare industry, says Glenn Palmiere, vice president of business development.

MediVu’s new projects are designed to:

*Support patients accessing their personal healthcare data, while promoting patient engagement;

*Provide a semantic “listener” to analyze both structured and unstructured data within clinical documents, enabling clinicians to make informed decisions without searching through healthcare records; and

*Provide a semantic rule engine to analyze data and determine a person’s overall health, providing linkages to the data upon which that determination is made.

“Our big differentiator is that no other technology exists that can offer as much useful information in a display, simply because of textual limitations,” Palmiere says. “The ability to understand what has happened, is happening and is going to happen through a simple glance is what we deliver to users, without adding to their cognitive load.”