Health IT, Payers

Startup makes it easier to keep up with quality measures

Chicago-based startup Apervita implemented electronic clinical quality measures from the National Committee for Quality Assurance. The company’s software makes it easier for healthcare organizations to identify data issues and improve quality.

Chicago-based software firm Apervita is making it easier for healthcare companies to report on quality measures. The startup, which focuses its efforts on helping hospitals and insurers share data, is building the first software tool to certify clinical quality measures from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

Nonprofit NCQA has a sprawling national dataset used to benchmark the quality of care. But the process of translating these directives into electronic health record systems can be time-consuming and can lead to variety in how they’re ultimately interpreted.

Apervita’s systems allow providers and payers just to import these specifications, saving them months of work. Dr. Blackford Middleton, Apervita’s chief informatics and innovation officer, said the system allows these measurements to be implemented across different care settings for better apples-to-apples quality measurements.

“Instead of having to read a piece of paper and having to turn it into a measure specification that a programmer could implement, they can just download it,” he said. “Quality measurement is very broad. That’s one of the reasons why physicians are so burned out, frankly.”

For example, a clinician could run the data at the end of the month to see whether they provided breast cancer screenings for their patients when appropriate. Health plans could also streamline how quality measures are implemented, making it easier for physicians to comply.

”You remove that variability between one group’s interpretation and the other group’s interpretation. In our view, it also promotes interoperability,” Apervita’s new COO and president Kareem Saad said. “It’s easier for providers and payers to track progress in real time against benchmarks.”

Apervita’s software is currently used by more than 2,500 hospitals. It is currently certified for 11 measures for the 2019 reporting period and will add 26 additional measures by mid-February.

Rick Moore, NCQA’s chief information officer, said he sees Apervita’s work as a step toward value-based care.

“Because there were so many different alternatives to report measures, CMS allowed all kinds of variations in reporting mechanisms. We think this is going to level the playing field,” he said. “Getting the data to actually move and get reported out has been somewhat arduous, whether for lack of interoperability or the fact that it takes so much to get it into practice. We think this is now going to become a reality.”

Founded in 2012, Apervita has raised more than $59 million in funding to date, most recently closing a $22 million funding round in November. Saad joined the company on Feb. 6, after serving as chief strategy officer of Sema4, a startup spun out of Mount Sinai Health System.

In the future, Saad said the company will continue to digitize as many of these measures as possible, and develop more tools that can help providers and payers drive better health outcomes and reduce costs.

“With this foundation, we are elaborating methods that allow providers and payers to collaborate on their shared math problems,” Apervita CIIO Middleton added. “Ultimately, plans and providers might have a very positive relationship. That’s one of my dreams.”

Photo credit: MartinPrescott, Getty Images

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