frost and sullivan award to apervita

BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

© Frost & Sullivan 2015 1 “We Accelerate Growth”



Contents

Industry Challenges .............................................................................................. 3

New Product Attributes and Customer Impact .......................................................... 4

Conclusion........................................................................................................... 7

Understanding New Product Innovation ......................................................................... 8

Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................... 8

Best Practice Award Analysis for Apervita ...................................................................... 9

Decision Support Scorecard ................................................................................... 9

New Product Attributes ....................................................................................... 10

Customer Impact ............................................................................................... 10

Decision Support Matrix ...................................................................................... 11

The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards ..................... 12

Research Methodology ........................................................................................ 12

About Frost & Sullivan .............................................................................................. 12

Copyright ...................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.



Background and Company Performance Industry Challenges

Frost & Sullivan recognizes that three big forces are coming together to drive the interest

in data analytics in healthcare—1) the increased volume and movement of digitized data

from insurance and billing information systems, electronic health records (EHRs), medical

devices, wearable sensors, consumer mobile devices, and, increasingly, social and public

health systems; 2) healthcare reform prioritizing improvements in patient care quality and

cost efficiency, and; 3) payment reform, specifically, the move to value-based

reimbursement that depends on assessing and reporting on numerous quality measures.

Today, data analytics is the lifeblood of modern healthcare organizations that need to turn

growing volumes of data into knowledge and insights that can drive continuous quality

improvement. Yet healthcare organizations are struggling to understand and manage their

vast data resources. This is partly due to the fact that healthcare data comes from

numerous internal and external sources, encompassing many different formats including

structured and free-text data that resides in EHRs, claims data from multiple payers, lab

and diagnostic imaging data, and, increasingly, streaming data from medical devices

including remote patient monitoring systems.

Bringing all these data together is complex and time-consuming. And, after data are

brought together and extracted from various sources and systems, they need to be

cleansed and normalized before put to use. While health data interoperability remains a

significant challenge for many organizations, there is positive movement and growing

incentives to free disparate clinical and non-clinical data so that it can be leveraged to

build new tools and applications for a range of clinical and business purposes. In fact,

there is a growing interest across all types of healthcare-related entities in developing

targeted or custom analytics applications designed to perform specific tasks or to address

specific, urgent challenges. This growing movement is partially driven by the fact that

there is more data of all types to work with now.

But more importantly, organizations are finding that new tools and apps are needed

because of the limitations of enterprise IT systems to quickly address the highly dynamic

and constantly evolving needs of healthcare organizations to meet growing requirements

around quality measures, meaningful use attestation, predictive analytics for population

health management, safety and performance reporting, and numerous other tasks

required by healthcare reform. Increasingly, vendors of health IT solutions are offering

APIs (application programming interface) tools that enable users to get at data that

resides in a particular program such as an EHR or other clinical or financial information

system so that they can quickly build out custom, targeted solutions. However, not all

healthcare organizations have the know-how or bandwidth to develop task-specific

modules and apps. In this situation, many organizations purchase commercial solutions

which can often be expensive and may not even fully address their specific analytics

needs.



New Product Attributes and Customer Impact

Match to Needs - Healthcare Organizations Need Multiple Options to Address

Growing Imperatives for Data Analytics

Across the US and the world, thousands of physicians, hospitals, medical researchers,

product manufacturers, and others exert enormous efforts to improve healthcare. The use

of information technology is key to this process. In recent years, healthcare organizations

have made significant investments towards the adoption of new information technology

leading to strong market growth for core clinical and financial IT systems. The market is

now focused on analytics tools that leverage data from these systems as a catalyst for

improving the quality of patient care and driving cost efficiencies. The ability to easily

share data and insights across organizations, IT systems, and geographies can go a very

long way towards turning data into knowledge via the use of analytics. Frost & Sullivan's

research confirms that Apervita provides a much-needed technology solution that

empowers healthcare organizations to easily publish and commercialize their own

internally developed knowledge and analytics tools, as well as purchase analytics and data

from other health enterprises. Apervita, launched in January 2015, is a secure, self-

service platform that allows anyone to author content, connect data, and share and sell

analytics. Using Apervita, healthcare organizations can publish and commercialize a wide

range of knowledge assets such as evidence-based analytics, including clinical decision

support rules, quality measures, medical equations, predictive scores, care gap

assessments, and other types of content which can be made easily accessible to a variety

of stakeholders both within and outside the organization. Apervita creates a “sharing

community” that enables stakeholders to come together to solve vexing problems that

plague the healthcare system. The notion of collaboration and sharing best practices to

advance healthcare transformation is something that more and more healthcare providers

are receptive to as witnessed by the rise in physician social networks like Sermo,

QuantiaMD, and Doximity. Solving healthcare is an extraordinary complex undertaking

and the best minds need to come together to enable process improvements. Apervita is an

exciting new product offering that has tremendous potential to quickly spread valuable

health knowledge and tools throughout the global healthcare community.

Positioning – A Rational Approach to Analytics: Easy, Powerful, and Affordable

Apervita is a self-service, subscription-based platform that provides a quick and

inexpensive vehicle for publishing and accessing algorithms, datasets and insights used for

various analytics functions. This approach has broad appeal to a variety of potential

customers including hospitals, health insurance companies, life sciences manufacturers,

and more. One key to Apervita's model is that the platform is an enabler, creating an

environment where health IP can be created, be exchanged, and evolve. Apervita is not

just another vendor offering analytics, it's an opportunity for many-to-many interaction.

Members of the Apervita Community can access, build, deploy, or disseminate new

analytics at a fraction of the cost of other commercial analytics solutions. This



democratization and “rationalization” of what is often an expensive and time-consuming

process enables healthcare organizations to more quickly implement new processes and

programs for improved patient care. Most importantly, Frost & Sullivan finds that Apervita

allows healthcare organizations to seamlessly grow and scale their analytics efforts. Once

the organizations’ data is streamed to upload through secure APIs, a wide variety of

analytics from Apervita’s growing catalog can be easily executed against any data type

and then be distributed to any system of engagement. This is important because of the

“snowball” effect that often takes place once organizations begin to avoid the pitfalls of

embedding data into analytics. Apervita allows healthcare organizations to concentrate

their resources on deploying new analytics rather than the time-consuming and costly task

of maintaining legacy analytics. No one wants yet another place to go for information.

Apervita offers the opportunity to leverage web services to integrate with many different

workflow systems and use cases.

Design – Delivering a Range of Tools that Enable Performance Improvement

The Apervita Market consists of a variety of tools and content including medical data sets,

algorithms, and quality measures published by members of the Apervita Community.

Healthcare organizations can load a wide variety of data on to the Apervita platform to

make shareable (or sellable) via the platform or through web services. Since its launch in

early 2015, the Apervita Market has grown rapidly and today consists of more than 150

member-contributed analytics, with another 100 soon to be published. Among the many

use cases for these solutions are predictive analytics to target patients most at risk for

early readmissions, dashboards for data visualization, and tools designed to ease some

common pain points around implementing and reporting on standard quality measures

required by various payers and regulatory bodies. With regard to analytics for quality

measures, Frost & Sullivan notes that Apervita, in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, now

offers the ability for members to easily import and disseminate CMS quality measures. The

two organizations have created a mechanism to take measures in the Quality Data Model

(QDM)-based Health Quality Measure Format (HQMF), which is not computable, and make

them readily imported into the Apervita platform. The Apervita measure editor allows

quality measures to be developed and maintained centrally by one or more experts and

tested, validated, and implemented by many. In addition, the Apervita measure editor

allows anyone, regardless software coding skills, to create a computable quality measure.

Quality – Expert, Secure Technology Suited to the Unique Needs of Healthcare

Organizations

The Apervita Market is a secure, HIPAA-compliant repository where data analytics can be

implemented, maintained, and applied in a flexible and customizable environment where

users can quickly adapt tools in response to their experience and changing needs. Frost &

Sullivan finds that Apervita makes analytics portable and easily disseminated and that

requires a secure, private and robust, cloud-based technology infrastructure to build from.

Every server at Apervita is 100 percent dedicated and fully controlled and maintained by



Apervita and its data service vendors. Its unified platform runs on the document-oriented

MongoDB database. Apervita says using MongoDB helps overcome common problems

associated with legacy database technology such as its ability to eliminate costly and rigid

data models, separating analytics from underlying data so they can be applied anywhere.

In addition, MongoDB specifically addresses problems associated with large volumes of

diverse data sources, a key technology consideration for healthcare organizations, and

also enables scalability which is vital to enable growth. Apervita is constantly improving

their platform with rigorous quality and assurance and testing, including adding encryption

and security features such as enhanced tracking and auditing.

Customer Service Experience – Multiple Choices for Sharing or Commercializing

Knowledge Assets

Apervita enables healthcare organizations to publish and distribute for free and/or

generate a revenue stream by commercializing their knowledge assets. Knowledge assets

of all types can be developed, maintained, exchanged, commercialized. This can be more

than analytics, in the form of ontologies (standard, proprietary, etc.) and relationships

between them such as mappings, value sets, etc., creating a leapfrog over previous

interoperability efforts by allowing standards and best practice to evolve. Apervita ’s

customers can be hospitals, physicians, IDNs, health plans, pharmaceutical manufacturers

or retailers. The company says that the most interest so far has been from hospitals and

health systems. These organizations often have internal staff and functions devoted to

various analytics activities because they are increasingly pressed to understand how to

measure quality and outcomes, particularly to prepare for value-based reimbursement

initiatives like shared savings and bundled payments. With regard to quality measures,

many healthcare providers want to reduce the internal effort needed to become measures

experts and simply focus on distributing the data/information that leads to improvements

regardless of whether they ultimately use those data for reporting to payers and

regulators. Apervita says they currently have more than 10 hospitals customers, including

prestigious organizations like the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic. In addition to

hospitals, other organizations that are good at creating analytics algorithms or quality

measures are also interested in using Apervita to publish their content and solutions so

that they can be consumed by other organizations. Frost & Sullivan firmly believes that

one of the key incentives for healthcare organizations to go the Apervita route is that

Apervita doesn’t own the data; the institution does. Unlike many other analytic vendors

who do resell the data due to secondary use rights baked into the contract, ownership and

rights to the data on Apervita remain with the authors. Apervita just provides the

platform and the tools but its members own the data, control the data, and have ultimate

authority to assign and provision the data to the appropriate people.

Price/Performance Value – Flexibility and Incentives

Apervita charges a subscription fee to users in addition to a percentage of royalties and

payments for intellectual property licensed on the platform. With the Apervita



marketplace, authors are free to price their own content based on the perceived value of

the analytic and where the author thinks that particular market is going. Some algorithms

have high price points due to their material returns. Things like standard measures that

are easily portable would likely not be very expensive. Other tools that involve greater

effort to produce would likely be priced higher. It’s up to the creators of the content. For

authors using the Apervita Market to sell their solutions, pricing usually follows two

models - 1) a subscription model which is an annual or monthly fee for using the analytics

tools as much as needed; and 2) a pricing model based on the number of runs of the

analytic. This per use or per call basis is a more scalable model for many customers and

involves selling a solution by some metric like the number of beds (for inpatient settings),

the number of patients, or the numbers of users. Apervita also expects price tiering by

the size of the institution or other metrics to be available soon. Frost & Sullivan's

competitive analysis shows that Apervita’s platform fees are low in comparison to other

analytic solutions that can cost hundreds of thousands, or even up to millions of dollars.

Apervita is orders of magnitude less than that. Pricing strategies and approaches will

inevitably evolve as the market evolves and as Apervita gains more members. Pricing

flexibility is another key advantage and incentive for driving membership to the Apervita

Market.

Conclusion

Frost & Sullivan's independent analysis clearly shows that Apervita is an innovative new

information technology vendor providing a flexible, affordable, and highly scalable

analytics platform and marketplace designed to address the growing need for analytics

among a wide range of healthcare organizations. Due the strong market potential for this

unique new product offering, Apervita has earned Frost & Sullivan’s 2015 New Product

Innovation Award.



Significance of New Product Innovation

Ultimately, growth in any organization depends upon continually introducing new products

to the market, and successfully commercializing those products. For these dual goals to

occur, a company must be best-in-class in three key areas: understanding demand,

nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the competition. This three-fold approach to

delivering customer service leadership is explored further below.

Understanding New Product Innovation

Innovation is about finding a productive outlet for creativity—for consistently translating

ideas into high quality products that have a profound impact on the customer.

Key Benchmarking Criteria

For the New Product Innovation Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently evaluated

two key factors— New Product Attributes and Customer Impact—according to the criteria

identified below.



New Product Attributes

Criterion 1: Match to Needs

Criterion 2: Reliability

Criterion 3: Quality

Criterion 4: Positioning

Criterion 5: Design

Customer Impact

Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value

Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience

Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience

Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience

Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Best Practice Award Analysis for Apervita

Decision Support Scorecard

To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance

categories, Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Scorecard. This tool

allows our research and consulting teams to objectively analyze performance, according to

the key benchmarking criteria listed in the previous section, and to assign ratings on that

basis. The tool follows a 10-point scale that allows for nuances in performance evaluation;

ratings guidelines are illustrated below.

RATINGS GUIDELINES

The Decision Support Scorecard is organized by New Product Attributes and Customer

Impact (i.e., the overarching categories for all 10 benchmarking criteria; the definitions

for each criteria are provided beneath the scorecard). The research team confirms the

veracity of this weighted scorecard through sensitivity analysis, which confirms that small

changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not lead to a significant change in the

overall relative rankings of the companies.

The results of this analysis are shown below. To remain unbiased and to protect the

interests of all organizations reviewed, Frost & Sullivan has chosen to refer to the other

key players as Competitor 2 and Competitor 3.



DECISION SUPPORT SCORECARD: NEW PRODUCT INNOVATION AWARD

Measurement of 1–10 (1 = poor; 10 = excellent)

New Product Innovation

New Product

Attributes

Customer

Impact Average Rating

Apervita 10.0 10.0 10.0

Competitor 2 9.5 9.0 9.25

Competitor 3 8.0 8.2 8.10


Criterion 1: Match to Needs

Requirement: Customer needs directly influence and inspire the product’s design and

positioning

Criterion 2: Reliability

Requirement: The product consistently meets or exceeds customer expectations for

consistent performance during its entire life cycle

Criterion 3: Quality

Requirement: Product offers best-in-class quality, with a full complement of features and

functionality

Criterion 4: Positioning

Requirement: The product serves a unique, unmet need that competitors cannot easily

replicate

Criterion 5: Design

Requirement: The product features an innovative design, enhancing both visual appeal

and ease of use

Customer Impact

Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value

Requirement: Products or services offer the best value for the price, compared to similar

offerings in the market

Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience

Requirement: Customers feel like they are buying the most optimal solution that

addresses both their unique needs and their unique constraints

Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience

Requirement: Customers are proud to own the company’s product or service, and have a

positive experience throughout the life of the product or service

Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience

Requirement: Customer service is accessible, fast, stress-free, and of high quality



Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Requirement: Customers have a positive view of the brand and exhibit high brand loyalty

Decision Support Matrix

Once all companies have been evaluated according to the Decision Support Scorecard,

analysts can then position the candidates on the matrix shown below, enabling them to

visualize which companies are truly breakthrough and which ones are not yet operating at

best-in-class levels.

DECISION SUPPORT MATRIX: NEW PRODUCT INNOVATION AWARD

High

Low

Low High

Cu

sto

mer I

mp

act


Apervita

Competitor 2

Competitor 3



The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best

Practices Awards

Research Methodology

Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research

methodology represents the analytical

rigor of our research process. It offers a

360-degree-view of industry challenges,

trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of

Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies.

Too often, companies make important

growth decisions based on a narrow

understanding of their environment,

leading to errors of both omission and

commission. Successful growth strategies

are founded on a thorough understanding

of market, technical, economic, financial,

customer, best practices, and demographic

analyses. The integration of these research

disciplines into the 360-degree research

methodology provides an evaluation

platform for benchmarking industry players and for identifying those performing at best-

in-class levels.

About Frost & Sullivan

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