Apervita, which once claimed to be the first health analytics marketplace, has ceased operations as of October 1.  

Chief Informatics and Innovation Officer Blackford Middleton wrote in a post on LinkedIn that the company had failed to drum up enough resources in its second round of funding.  

"It has been a great ride full of innovation and impact," he said.  

WHY IT MATTERS  

As an analytics startup, Apervita had struck up partnerships with major health systems including the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo. Just this June, it had acquired Carta Healthcare's AI-powered data abstraction technology for its platform's interoperability layer.

As outlined by Middleton in his LinkedIn post, the vendor had also been the first organization to develop an electronic health record-agnostic "algorithm and application marketplace" and the first organization to support digital quality measure execution at scale.  

It had, said Middleton, also created an industry-first cloud-native build-test-run environment for CQL digital measure authoring and execution.  

The team had deployed the Joint Commission’s Direct Data Submission Platform to more than 3,500 healthcare organizations in the United States, and had developed software for embedding cognitive support in disparate EHRs and tools to support practice-based research.

Apervita had also launched its clinical intelligence tools via strategic joint development relationships, aiming to demonstrate the convergence of computable clinical guidelines, and quality measurement.   

Middleton also touted the vendor's VitalTM platform, which he said represented advancements toward a learning health system.  

"Even with this market momentum, however, we ran into challenges with our second round of funding and have simply run out of runway," he wrote. "As a result, we ceased operations as of October 1, 2021."   

As of Wednesday, Apervita's website was still up, with no notice posted about the closure.  

THE LARGER TREND  

Middleton had frequently spoken about Apervita's role in advancing a learning health system.  

In a recent Q&A with Healthcare IT News he described "the technology-enabled system of health and care delivery that creates and uses interoperable healthcare data, monitors and measures all important aspects of care, uses shareable computable knowledge, and has built-in feedback loops to improve care and fine-tune computable practice guidelines, and machine learning algorithms that create cognitive assistants in care delivery."  

Middleton, who is a member of the advisory council to the standards body HL7, also noted the importance of interoperability – for which Apervita had released a tool in 2020 – toward realizing this goal.   

"The interoperability of data and of knowledge ... are cornerstones of this vision," he said.  

ON THE RECORD  

"We want to thank the many organizations and individuals who have dedicated themselves to our mission – our partners, our clients, our investors and – most of all – our employees," Middleton wrote. We are truly grateful."

Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Twitter: @kjercich
Email: kjercich@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.