Mike Miliard

The company will also tout a new data recovery partnership with Amazon Web Services, the CEO said.

Group joins with insurance broker Willis Towers Watson on new program.

A clinical professor at the school will discuss at HIMSS16 how a combination of people, process and technology drove success.

Healthcare organizations are making big investments in population health and patient engagement platforms as they prepare to move past meaningful use and toward value-based reimbursement, according to "The Big Mega HIT Purchasing Report" released Monday by market research firm peer60. Electronic health records remain core to healthcare IT, according to the report, which gathered 567 responses from CEOs, CIOs, nursing and financial leaders and others with purchasing authority at hospitals and medical practices. However,many customers are still dissatisfied with their products. Projected EHR replacement rates for 2016 show 23 percent of health providers (inpatient and outpatient combined) planning to look for new vendors, according to peer60. [Also: Hospitals keeping close eye on revenue cycle vendors] Still, "population health and patient engagement are the hottest areas by a wide margin," wrote peer60 executive vice president Chris Jensen in the report. "It’s really no surprise these two segments continue to lead the way among hospital IT upgrades considering their impact on successful migration to value-based care and value-based purchasing." As for pop health, peer60s sees some stabilization in contracting plans. In 2015, roughly 25 percent of providers were certain they'd keep their population health vendor; in 2016, that amount has doubled. "The pressure is on for vendors that have not already made their mark in this market because they’re about to be squeezed by increasing renewal rates and a declining pool of hospitals that have not already adopted," said Jensen. [Also: New trends ahead for imaging informatics] But when it comes to patient engagement, authors see the opposite. "More enterprise vendors are capturing more of the minds of providers, while interest in the best of breed crowd is beginning to dwindle," Jensen said. Other big purchasing trends are also unsurprising. Data security, enterprise analytics and revenue cycle management are all in play. Security technology, especially, has seen a big jump in provider interest. "In 2015 it was at the bottom of the list of top IT priorities and placed third this year," said Jensen. "Since this is not a growth market with 90 percent of hospitals already employing a true data security solution, the jump in interest in this area likely means the replacement market for more robust solutions in this very critical segment is heating up. Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN

The hacktivist group launched multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks against the hospital's servers in protest of the controversial custody case of Justina Pelletier.

Orion Health at HIMSS16 will unveil a data platform aimed at enabling precision medicine and a new management app geared towards participants in the Medicare Shared Savings Accountable Care Organization Program. The new iteration of Amadeus, for instance, is meant to help providers move from the "who" of population health to the "what" of precision medicine, an Orion official said. By aggregating, storing and helping interpret data, the technology can help health organizations better devise treatment plans geared specifically to the patients deemed to be in need of particular attention. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] Meanwhile, Orion will also be touting its new MSSP Management app at the conference. By integrating data into the reporting and monitoring workflows while keeping tabs on quality measure thresholds, the tool aims to help ACOs wring value from the Medicare Shared Savings Program. What’s more, the company will be spotlighting client success stories at the show.  Arizona-based ACO Scottsdale Health Partners, for its part, will discuss how adopting Orion's data exchange, and population health tools have helped it tackle the Triple Aim. And executives from Cal INDEX, the biggest state HIE in the United States, intend to talk about how it has been able to mix clinical and claims data and, in turn, deliver those to clinicians at the point of care. Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN 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.

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.

Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology says the feds should do more than just suggest safeguards.

IT support is emerging as a key factor in hospital satisfaction and many trends will shape these relationships, report says.

WE Communications’ senior vice president Nicole Miller shares advice ahead of her HIMSS16 session on managing customer messaging in a cybersecurity situation.