Cloud Computing

Providence Health and Services also joins consortium of hospitals teaming with Syapse to establish OPN that will advance data sharing and speed development of personalized cancer treatments.

Intermountain also led a $12 million funding round that Zebra said it will use to build out its analytics engine with machine learning algorithms for diagnosing imaging scans. 

The former CMIO of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation made a new move that he said will enable him to help change healthcare in a systemized manner.

The new initiative will focus on gleaning insights into the care and treatment of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer.

Practice Fusion veterans, including former chief executive Ryan Howard, on Tuesday announced a new company called iBeat. The startup is working to create a device that will continuously monitor a user’s heart activity, the company said. Howard called the emerging offering a wearable-as-a-service. The tangible device resembles a wrist-worn smartwatch capable of alerting the user as well as caregivers and emergency responders should a heart event or irregularity occur. iBeat also consists of Larry Stone as Lead Front-end Architect, Brian Boarini as Director of Product, and Kristin Tinsley as Director of Marketing and Communications. All four previously worked at Practice Fusion, which Howard founded in 2005. Stone has worked on products for Lenovo, Tesla, Disney, AT&T, Verizon and other companies, while Boarini worked on projects at Google and Tinsley worked with MySpace and TigerText. The company said it intends to double its staff by year’s end with a focus on engineering, design, growth marketing and operations.  Twitter: SullyHIT Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

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The platform will enable payments to be processed faster, reduce risk for hospitals transitioning to value-based care and ultimately decrease the cost of bundled procedures, the companies said. 

IBM plans to launch a cloud-based version of Watson's cognitive computing technology, designed solely to zero in on cybersecurity language, as a part of a year-long research project, the company announced Tuesday. The Watson for Cyber Security platform is touted as the first technology to offer cognition of security data. Watson will pull the majority of its cognitive data from the X-Force research library: a threat intelligence platform with 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and more than 100,000 documented vulnerabilities. "Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cybersecurity jobs by 2020, we'd still have a skills crisis in security," Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security said in a statement. "The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime." [Also: IBM Watson offers free storage to Apple ResearchKit developers] Beginning in the fall, IBM will also collaborate with eight universities to expand the amount of security data the company has already inputted into the platform. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and New York University are among the institutions who will work with IBM to contribute to Watson's training. The students will also train Watson on cybersecurity language, while working close with IBM's security experts to learn how to read security intelligence to gain first-hand experience in cognitive security. IBM plans to process up to 15,000 security documents – threat intelligence reports, cybercrime strategies, threat databases – each month over the next training stages in collaboration will all stakeholders. Watson for Cybersecurity will not only provide insights on any emerging threats, it will also make recommendations on how to stop them. Additionally, the system will use data mining techniques to find outliers. IBM will begin beta production deployments later this year. "By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations and knowledge to security professionals," said van Zadelhoff, "bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training."

Getting pharmacists involved in patient-centric activities, including being part of clinical care teams, is a little easier thanks to telepharmacy technology. When Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, needed to optimize its pharmacy workflow with the goal of improving patient care, it turned to PowergridRx, a cloud-based HIPAA–compliant telepharmacy platform from San Francisco-based PipelineRx. Starting in February, Dartmouth-Hitchcock began deploying PowerGridRx in its hospitals across New England. PowerGridRx is a software as a service platform that aggregates, manages and optimizes virtual pharmacy management for health systems. In addition, it differentiates Dartmouth-Hitchcock's telepharmacy network and manages the order verification process for current and future facilities. The interoperable technology platform is designed to improve medication administration visibility between facilities and addresses logistical and budgetary challenges that arise from managing and staffing multiple care settings. [Also: Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Harvard Pilgrim join forces on population health] Sarah Pletcher, MD, medical director and founder, Center for Telehealth at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, said the health system uses PowerGrid Rx as a tool in the delivery of telepharmacy services across wider landscape. "Our customers are the ultimate end user in that regard," Pletcher said. After going live in six hospitals Dartmouth-Hitchcock has processed thousands of patient orders: "We have data that suggests the benefit to the hospitals in that we are allowing them to load-level staffing and optimize their in hospital team sometimes deploying them to more patient care or clinical activities," she said. Pletcher pointed out that for many smaller rural and critical access hospitals, the volumes that they see on weekends for example, aren't enough to rationalize them having an in-house pharmacist. "But we are also finding hospitals recognizing the value of having telepharmacy support for scenarios where they want to allow their pharmacists to be out on the floors helping with patient care," she said. In a cancer infusion suite for instance, Pletcher explained that oftentimes pharmacists are part of clinical team working on projects where they might be involved in an electronic medical record implementation, or working on quality or formulary projects for the hospital. "Any time we can help extend their team to allow them to optimize their in-hospital team, we're happy to be there for them," she said. From a technology perspective, Pletcher noted that there are obstacles associated with integration and with host IT systems and EMRs. She said that with anything involving multiple hospital IT departments and multiple hospital EMRs, there's always a challenge – not just the technology integration, but cultural barriers where hospitals have different levels of comfort for how much bi-directional integration they want with outside software platforms. "Because we offer so many other telemedicine services this is something we are familiar with managing – the telepharmacy is the latest service – we have six or seven other 24/7 telemedicine services to hospitals where we've had to contend with IT or EMR integration. We kind of know to expect and support those conversations." Pletcher said Dartmouth-Hitchcock is expanding its telepharmacy program to more sites and more regions. "We're excited about the opportunity to further integrate our telepharmacy solutions with other clinical services." Industry insiders contend that the demand for PowerGrid Rx-type technology is on the rise for multi-site multi-facility organizations that are growing and want to tie their pharmacy network closer and closer together. "We want to create a platform that enables them to share pharmacy labor and pharmacy resources across their whole organization, opposed to having to staff individually each hospital within their network, this enables them to tie them to together," said Brian Roberts, CEO of PipelineRx. Roberts noted that among the challenges is to work with different and multiple types of IT systems. "Some of our customers have eight to ten different types of IT systems that they work with - we integrate back with their host IT systems and bring it into one platform." The other side, according to Roberts, is that they want a system that can capture policies and procedures for each one of their individual hospitals. So for example, if they were creating a central telepharmacy center they would want that telepharmacist to have information at their fingertips. "Our tool helps consolidate and bring policies and procedures into one software offering," said Roberts who added that because PowerGrid Rx is a cloud-based piece of software – there is no hardware on each individual site. "So we use the power of the Internet to build a private cloud that can manage all that information – manage the information and store the information for the hospitals." Roberts said CIOs like that because it’s a cloud-based piece of software that doesn't require them to have to go and do updates and update hardware; that's all taken care of from the PipelineRx side.

The platform, developed by Yale School of Medicine researchers and Yale New Haven Health System, is designed to enable patients to both access their records and participate in studies.