Chicago-based Apervita, a health analytics and data platform provider, has announced its integral role in developing the US Department of Veterans (VA) Digital Health Platform. As part of the proof-of-concept for the Digital Health Platform, Apervita acted as the analytics engine to help the VA integrate information for all patients and care providers across the VA system to improve patient care.
The goal of the Digital Health Platform is to create an interoperable dashboard spanning a veteran’s complete medical record. It will integrate patient data from all electronic health record systems, wearables, connected devices and apps, then add analytics and engagement platforms to make it easier for veterans to obtain healthcare. Under the management of prime contractor Georgia Tech, Apervita worked with Salesforce and MuleSoft to build pathways and guidelines to coordinate patient data and care.
“What the VA wanted to demonstrate is a public-private partnership collaboration to bring in the best of breed health tech and rapidly deploy guidelines,” Apervita cofounder and chief marketing officer Rick Halton told MobiHealthNews in an interview. “At the core, you have real-time analytics that can deliver intelligence to any platform, whether it is an EHR, supply chain management or customer relationship. So,what we’re talking about is creating a standardized guideline, liberating data and connecting knowledge – computable knowledge – so they can connect together and become operational.”
Traditionally, when veterans go to seek healthcare, their data can be tied up in such a way that coordinating their care and creating a treatment plan can take months or even years.
“A Veteran’s data and full health record is currently housed in many different, complex systems, each holding discrete records of the Veteran’s interactions with her military, community, and VA health teams,” La Verne Council, the VA’s assistant secretary for information and technology and chief information officer for the office of information and technology, said in a statement. “Our DHP liberates this data, connecting to each health record and enabling a wrap-around platform that continuously gathers this discrete data, analyzes each clinical interaction, and prescribes precision, proven care.”
In the proof-of-concent, Apervita provided the analytics, MuleSoft provided the API, and Salesforce provided workflow user engagement. The project centered around three case use studies. For example, a veteran named Byron needed to coordinate care outside the VA for a traumatic brain injury, and the Digital Health Platform acted as a unified view across various sites and settings where his data was stored and care could be received.
“We’ve created a platform that allows health enterprises to capture and deploy their own health knowledge and turn that knowledge into computable analytics that they can plug directly into their workflow,” said Halton. “What was interesting about these cases is that they aren’t just clinical, but also showed how the platform could liberate data for things like eligibility, financial information and clinical data within one single pathway.”
