New offering provides transparency and accuracy as healthcare industry continues the transition to digital
Apervita, a trusted healthcare technology leader delivering innovative technology solutions to payers, providers and other stakeholders, today launched its digital Quality Measurement-as-a-Service offering (QMaaS™), the industry’s first cloud-based digital quality measurement platform.
Based on Apervita’s Clinical Quality Language (CQL) engine, QMaaS offers a secure and scalable multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to deliver consistent, near real-time provider quality measurement to third-party applications, data visualization tools, client data warehouses, and clinical workflow systems to inform quality improvement efforts.
QMaaS powers The Joint Commission’s cloud-based Direct Data Submission Platform (DDSP), empowering its 4,500+ accredited hospitals by simultaneously offering more valuable and timely insight and reducing the required resources to do so. The DDSP leverages the same unique QMaaS capabilities that enable healthcare organizations to specify, develop, test, and execute electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs), as well as to create and distribute applications that use them, in the cloud. “What we’ve accomplished during the last two years with the Direct Data Submission Platform has delivered ongoing value to our accredited hospitals,” said David W. Baker, MD, MPH, FACP, executive vice president for the Division of Health Care Quality Evaluation at The Joint Commission.
Implementing and certifying new measures, as well as maintaining them, is a burdensome annual process for many healthcare stakeholders. QMaaS eliminates this costly and often manual process by taking on measure management, calculation, maintenance, validation, and results delivery. This enables payers and providers to reallocate expert resources to more mission-critical initiatives and value-creating activities.
“Maintaining and managing quality measures is time-consuming and expensive, but required,” said current Lumina Health Partners Principal and former Chief Data Officer at Ascension, Rick Howard. “Being able to hand this off to Apervita saves organizations this frustration. Better yet, it eliminates the need for building costly in-house solutions. QMaaS empowers organizations to take action on quality improvement initiatives and focus staff on delivering the highest quality care, instead of trying to simply measure it well after the fact.”
QMaaS ingests certified measure specifications natively from official sources such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) into Apervita’s certified CQL-based rules engine. This removes human interpretation from the process, which guarantees the accuracy and consistency of the measure specification. When implemented on Apervita’s cloud-based platform, CQL helps stakeholders like payers, providers and vendors cut time and effort for measure implementation from months to hours.
Other benefits of CQL include industry standardization, re-usability for many value-creating uses including computable guidelines, care gap prevention and cognitive support, transparency and interoperability, all of which are critical components when delivering quality outcomes. Reusability is one of the more powerful features of CQL; its ability to be reused and repurposed can be leveraged to assess compliance with best practices in real-time and drive real time workflow enablements to proactively engage providers through clinician-centric cognitive support. QMaaS further enables high value patient-level clinical logic in CQL to be reused to express key clinical concepts, including detailed insights into care gaps, to be repurposed for numerous high-value use cases such as preemptive decision support.
Apervita’s multi-tenant cloud-based platform brings unique capabilities to digital measurement such as single patient execution, care gap insights and Deep Encryption™ technology (PHI-field level encryption). Apervita’s platform enables the sharing of measure assets inter and intra-organization so that key stakeholders can reutilize their work for other purposes. Additionally, Apervita’s CQL engine produces automated insights that can be securely shared with providers across the continuum of care to help close and even prevent gaps in care. Apervita is also a CMS Qualified Registry and can support any organization with its quality submission.
A leader in quality improvement and digital quality measurement, just last month Apervita announced its ONC modular certification of the Apervita platform. NCQA also certified Apervita for digital Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) measurement with a certified CQL engine, an industry first; and in February 2020, Apervita was the first company to receive eCQM certification from NCQA using a proprietary CQL measure computation engine.
“CMS and NCQA have made it clear—digital measures are happening,” said Kevin Hutchinson, Apervita CEO. “Apervita is proud to pave the way for industry stakeholders to take advantage of the many benefits of digital quality measurement enabling performance optimization. Guaranteeing accuracy of the measure specification is revolutionary as it provides payers, providers and vendors with peace of mind that they will no longer have to worry about whether or not they implemented a measure correctly.”
QMaaS supplements the well-regarded Apervita technology lineup, which includes a platform for payers and providers to jointly manage value-based contracts in their networks, and its interoperability and data-sharing services, which enable seamless, secure sharing of health records between health plans, providers and their members and patients.
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About Apervita
Apervita is the trusted healthcare collaboration platform for quality measurement, clinical intelligence, value optimization and interoperability. We empower payers and providers and other stakeholders to more efficiently and effectively measure clinical and financial performance, improve clinical quality and administer and run analytics on value-based contracts. By providing an independent, secure, trusted platform to perform shared analyses, Apervita uniquely allows stakeholders to gain mutual, continuous clinical and financial insights and integrate those insights in various systems and workflows simultaneously and at scale. Serving more than one in three hospitals in the United States and several nationally recognized health plans, Apervita conducts more than 10 billion value-based computations and insights for our clients every year. The company maintains office locations in Chicago and Boston.
Media contact
Michelle Schallhorn
Vice President, Marketing, Apervita
michelle.schallhorn@apervita.com