Cloud Computing

(SPONSORED) One of the key trends will continue to be increased cloud adoption by enterprises and organizations.

(SPONSORED) The major trend in healthcare in 2016 and beyond is how to nail down the issue of interoperability.

Nuance will unveil its Dragon Medical One Platform at HIMSS16, an evolution of its speech recognition and documentation tool that aims to redefine the relationship clinical users have with healthcare technology, the company says. According to Jonathon Dreyer, Nuance's director of cloud and mobile solutions marketing, increasing demands on physicians – not least the number of places they need to be and IT systems with which they're supposed to interact – has changed the equation, putting a premium on flexibility and mobility. Nuance touts its new cloud-based Dragon Medical One platform as a tool to offer physicians a unified speech recognition functionality – irrespective of care settings, workflows, devices or applications. The new version brings analytics functionality that keep tabs on the time spent documenting, helping health organizations track efficiency and productivity. Additionally, workflow enhancements such as Dragon Medical Advisor offer notes to help improve ICD-10 specificity, case mix index and more.  A pair of new features, PowerPack and PowerMic Mobile, enable users to tap into evidence-based content using a smartphone as a secure microphone to dictate, edit and navigate the EHR on any workstation. Whether they are dictating into EHRs or mobile messaging apps, the Dragon Medical One desktop app offers secure speech recognition wherever physicians need to document. With a unique Nuance Healthcare ID, doctors gain access to an ecosystem of personalized tools. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "We are always interested in technology that improves productivity, and cloud-based speech supports the ways physicians work and eases the effort of entering clinical documentation into patient records," said Don Fosen, director of IT at Naperville, Illinois-based Edward-Elmhurst Hospital, in a prepared statement, noting that the tools "have let us scale voice recognition in a way that we simply couldn't have done in any other way." Nuance’s Dreyer added that the vendor has been seeing a shift in doctors’ workflow.  "There's a general trend of physicians being in more places, having to interact with not just the EHR but with other technologies as part of their daily workflow," Dreyer said.  Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

A new module will enable users to snap pictures with smartphones and tablets and then saving them to the Carestream platform and integrating them with an EHR.

New offering on Welltok platform aimed at some of largest employers, including IBM.

Jonathan Bush, the high-octane, no-holds-barred co-founder and CEO of athenahealth, became Johnny-on-the-spot on Wednesday. While in San Francisco to attend the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Bush took a few minutes to perform CPR on a man he found lying on the sidewalk. The man appeared to not be breathing, possibly suffering from a heart attack, according to an account of the incident published in Bush's hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe. The incident occurred near the corner of Mission and 1st Street in San Francisco's downtown. According to the Globe, Bush had been to a nearby Walgreens drugstore to buy an ice pack (he recently hurt his knee skiing). He was on his way to a meeting at the J.P. Morgan event when he saw the man lying on the sidewalk, turned him over, saw his face was blue and he seemed to not be breathing. After Bush performed CPR, the man started breathing again. Bush, who has long been critical of inefficiencies in American healthcare, is quoted by the Globe as saying, "It was like the U.S. healthcare system. Everybody was standing there, nobody was helping." Long before he and former U.S. CTO Todd Park started athenahealth, Bush worked as an emergency medical technician in New Orleans. He writes about it in his book, Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care. [See also: Jonathan Bush on where it hurts most.] Bush writes in his book that he was looking for a summer job when a family acquaintance told him that, to save lives, the best thing he could do was to work on an ambulance and get to know a crack trauma unit. That's how Bush ended up that summer working with the trauma unit at Charity Hospital in the Big Easy. He and the crew did save lives, he writes. New Orleans gave him hands-on training in urgent care, "and, just as important, a primer on American society." A spokeswoman for Bush told Healthcare IT News on Thursday that athenahealth could confirm the event in San Francisco happened, but would not comment at this time because Bush and his staff are still working to understand how the man is doing. [See also: Newsmaker interview: Jonathan Bush.]

Biotech firm will purchase a number of Flatiron’s life science offerings and the companies.

Healthfinch, which owns the prescription refill application Swoop, has landed $7.5 million in its first round of funding to bankroll the development of its new practice automation platform "Charlie." Investment firm Adams Street Partners led the funding, with participation from JumpStart Ventures, Chicago Ventures, OCA Ventures, Abundant Ventures and a private investor. This funding round takes healthfinch's total raised to more than $10 million since the company, founded by CEO Jonathan Baran and Chief Medical Officer Lyle Berkowitz, launched in 2011. "The rapid adoption and demand from health systems for Swoop is a clear indication that automating routine and repeatable tasks is the future of healthcare delivery,” said Baran in a statement. “To this end, we're moving beyond individual applications in favor of a robust practice automation platform that can handle many more tasks beyond prescription refill requests including visit planning, patient communication and much more."   Investment firms such as Adams Street Partners have been quick to recognize healthfinch's vision and its ability to execute for customers, said Tom Bremner, partner at Adams Street, in a statement. "Healthfinch represents a very strategic and promising addition to our investment portfolio,” he said, “They have what we deem to be a winning trifecta: strong clinical and executive leadership, a compelling product roadmap that will bring clear value to the healthcare system, and most importantly, clients who have been using healthfinch products to achieve up to 5X efficiency and financial ROI." Baran and his executive team, including Chief Operating Officer Sanaz Cordes, and Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Broad, will use Series A funds to add to their technical and clinical teams to accelerate development of the Charlie platform and expedite delivery to health systems, they said. Baran first made his pitch for automating physician tasks in September 2012 at athenahealth’s annual MDP (More Disruption Please) Conference in Northport, Maine. "Half of all primary care physicians are burnt out," Baron told the audience. "So this is on us” to "automate and delegate." “We’re burning out the doctors. And we can’t have happy patients and good health systems if we don’t have happy providers, said Cordez, speaking at the Venture+ Forum at HIMSS15. Twitter: @HealthITNews

From population health management to meaningful use, cybersecurity to EHR usability, healthcare will face an array of challenges and opportunities over the next 12 months. Beth Israel Deaconess CIO John Halamka, MD, offers his predictions for 2016.

Researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have developed an interactive Web application and dataset that puts pediatric cancer mutations and growth under a microscope.