Analytics startup Apervita, which bills itself as the first health analytics marketplace, has garnered $18M in its first round of funding.

Apervita, which was previously called Pervasive Health, will use the capital to support its goal of empowering enterprises across the globe to transform health knowledge and data into computable insight, addressing healthcare's most pressing challenges, company executives said in announcing the funding.

Company founder and CEO Paul Magelli said the funding would accelerate the development of its platform, giving health professionals access to thousands of analytics at a fraction of the time and cost of today’s proprietary analytics solutions. The growth capital will also be used to expand Apervita’s sales and marketing team to promote the platform and address growing market demands.

Magelli's goal is to have analytics and algorithms in the hands of all healthcare providers across the country through Apervita's cloud-based platform.

[See also: Clinical data analytics next big thing.]

GE Ventures and Baird Capital led the financing round, with participation from Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Math Ventures and existing investors.

Apervita, the secure and HIPAA–compliant cloud platform, was developed with seed funding secured in 2013.

Since then, the platform has proven effective at scale with providers in the U.S. and U.K., across tens of millions of patient facts and hundreds of users. Apervita was recently named a finalist  in the prestigious University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) and HealthXL innovation competitions.

"Apervita facilitates the capture and diffusion of health insight by making it easier than ever to author, connect and collaborate," said Magelli in a news release. "The Apervita self-service platform enables authors to share their evidence-based research as computable insights and publish them to a marketplace, allowing users to subscribe, and connect them to their workflow.

"This investment will accelerate our mission to empower the world’s leading community of health professionals to solve thousands of global challenges by connecting their trusted knowledge to practice," he added.

Apervita’s repository of analytics includes evidenced-based content from top  academic medical centers, such as Mayo Clinic. They address many fundamental provider challenges in areas that include chronic disease management, preventable adverse events, readmissions, cancer, early warning, quality and safety.

The portfolio will soon expand to include operational and financial areas as well.

One algorithm developed at Mayo Clinic allows physicians to utilize the Apervita platform to analyze information stored in medical records, identifying high risk patients in most need of

"By combining marketplace economics, cloud computing and light-touch streaming implementation, Apervita will fundamentally change the way healthcare is delivered," said Noah Lewis, managing director of healthcare at GE Ventures, in a press statement. "Their innovative business model aligns perfectly with our vision for data-driven, predictive healthcare, and we look forward to helping them scale through this next stage of expansion."