Cloud Computing

IBM Watson said it will provide free storage to nonprofit organizations and academic medical center researchers using Apple’s ResearchKit. But developers looking to tap into the supercomputer's analytics will have to pay.

SQL Server 2016 will bring new functions for protecting data in motion and at rest, visual reporting, cloud-first features and big data analytics tools.

CloudMedx, a big data health analytics company, has acquired Gyrus Labs to extend its CloudMedx Analytics Platform, which is designed to help improve patient care through data insights.

Digital document kingpin Adobe has unveiled the first integration between Adobe Sign and Adobe Marketing Cloud. The integration is designed to eliminate costs and inefficiencies surrounding manual, paper-based processes for enrolling and services, including healthcare enrollment, registration and services. Adobe Sign, formerly known as Document Cloud eSign, now features an upgraded and modernized mobile app experience and works in a seamless fashion with Adobe Experience Manager Forms, a key component of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe said this can help an organization go completely digital with anything from credit card applications to government benefit forms to medical forms. Adobe also has announced new Document Cloud storage integrations with Box and Microsoft OneDrive. These integrations are designed to make it easier to access and work on PDF files from anywhere. "Adobe has led the global standard in secure digital documents with the PDF format, and we are working toward the same thing with secure and reliable signatures," said Lisa Croft, group product marketing manager for Document Cloud at Adobe. "And related to Adobe Sign, we are announcing the first integration across the Adobe Marketing Cloud, because we are focused on helping customers deliver good experiences for their customers." Croft cited healthcare as an example, where organizations need, for instance, to digitally obtain information from a patient. "That journey can be a big challenge, to serve the patient appropriately and set everything up," she added. "This new integration is meant to make all of that easier." Tools within Adobe Marketing Cloud can ease the creation of forms with many multiple data fields, and make completing such forms an easier task, Croft said. "In a lot of cases today, healthcare organizations still have to print forms to gather signatures," she said. "With our new integration, we have been able to make that process 100 percent digital. Take all the data and flow it into a final version of a form and then Sign can electronically capture a signature – nothing has to be printed. A healthcare organization can do the whole patient onboarding process without having to print a document."

With Google, IBM and Microsoft all setting sights squarely on healthcare, and analysts predicting 30 percent of providers will run cognitive analytics on patient data by 2018, the risk of investing too late may outweigh the risk of doing so too soon.

The vendor said that the latest changes are driven by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services new Oncology Care Model.

The tool will help create a more accurate profile of behavioral health patients and identify any gaps in care.

The deal ties Dell’s population health solutions into Ensocare’s cloud service for care coordination, the vendors said.

The potential next EHR would more closely resemble modern interfaces such as Google and Facebook and leverage FHIR, if the VA indeed opts to move away from VistA. Undersecretary David Shulkin said the department is evaluating the best way forward. 

Cloud-based athenahealth is expanding its portfolio to include machine learning and artificial intelligence with its acquisition of analytics startup Arsenal Health. Arsenal's Smart Scheduling tool has already been effective with athenahealth's providers, officials said. The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, will move Arsenal from a third-party vendor to a native capability available for all athenahealth's customers through its athenaCoordinator network. athenahealth also sees value as a potential "on-ramp to the machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence space in healthcare," said Doran Robinson, vice president of athenaCoordinator, in a press statement. In the future, athenahealth's officials say they hope the acquisition will accelerate the company's analytics and AI capabilities, broadening insights and enhancing offerings for its 74 million patient records. "The prospect of building on Arsenal Health’s technology and combining it with our own valuable data to positively impact care and expand the power of our network is extremely compelling," said Robinson. Arsenal Health was athenahealth's first investment through its More Disruption Please initiative, which drives decisions based on three pillars: the MDP Accelerator, athenahealth Marketplace and MDP Network. "The company is a testimonial to what we’re trying to do with our "More Disruption Please" program – provide young health tech companies the opportunity to develop and scale with athenahealth’s support and resources," he added. "By joining athenahealth, we believe we can accelerate our growth while effectively testing and advancing our predictive analytics technology," said Arsenal Health CEO Chris Moses in a statement. "To date, our success lies in our ability to track client performance, learn the intricacies of how providers work and ultimately predict their needs."