For virtually every consumer challenge, need or desire, there's an app.
And in healthcare, there are lines of code or procedures to do everything from manage sepsis to identify patients at risk for diabetes.
But there hasn't been the equivalent of an app store. Paul Magelli, CEO of Chicago-based Apervita, aims to change that, launching an exchange with more than 10 hospitals, including Mayo Clinic and the U.K.'s Norfolk and Suffolk.
The 2-year-old startup raised $18 million from Chicago-based Baird Capital and GE Ventures, along with Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Math Venture Partners.
Apervita's technology platform allows hospitals, doctors and researchers in healthcare to take software and other intellectual property and license it to other institutions. Apervita will charge a subscription fee, starting in the thousands of dollars, to users of the exchange and take a cut of royalties and payments for intellectual property licensed on the platform.
“Healthcare has created this enormous inventory of analytics that can be applied or transformed to save lives,” Magelli said. “In most other industries, there are tens of thousands of algorithms; in healthcare, it's millions.”
One example of technology that could be shared, rather than reinvented, is an algorithm developed by Mayo Clinic researchers to analyze information stored in medical records and identifying high-risk patients most in need of implantable cardiac defibrillators.
Magelli is betting the timing is right for an exchange because of changes in healthcare that reward and penalize hospitals based on improving care, such as reducing re-admissions or infections suffered by patients while receiving care.
“This is a big idea,” said Michael Liang, a Baird partner. “As we've spoken with universities and hospitals, the common themes were: We have content, analytics and algorithms, but we don't know what to do with them. And they're all looking to improve their workflow solutions.”
