BOSTON—Mobile health could transform healthcare but “only if we get it right,” said Joseph Kvedar, MD, director of the Center for Connected Health at its 2014 symposium on Oct. 24.

BOSTON--Tufts Medical Center (Tufts MC) and Specialists On Call ("SOC"), the nation's largest provider of specialist physician services to hospitals via telemedical technologies, are partnering to provide a new neurology support option to community hospitals in Massachusetts. The collaboration will bring together Tufts MC’s neurology specialists and SOC's established telepractices and capability to deliver highly efficient, quality telemedical services. The new program will be called Tufts Medical Center TeleNeurology.

BOSTON—Innovation is “new, surprising and radically useful,” said Michael Palmer, chief innovation and digital officer at Aetna, speaking at the 2014 Center for Connected Health Symposium on Oct. 23. Aetna’s innovation lab is entrenched in testing new tools and digital products that meet the full range of this definition.  

Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell announced an $840 million initiative to fund successful applicants who work directly with medical providers to rethink and redesign their practices, moving from systems driven by quantity of care to ones focused on patients’ health outcomes and coordinated healthcare systems.

Combining the data of EHRs, a commercial medication database and a community health information exchange increased the accuracy of patients' medication lists, according to a study published in the American Journal of Managed Care.

What are your top health IT priorities for 2015?

The Louis W. Sullivan Institute for Healthcare Innovation has developed six key guiding principles of patient-centered care that expand on the Institute of Medicine's definition.

The first draft criteria for the necessity, appropriateness and workability of the Accountable Care Organization Accreditation Program (ACOAP) are open to interested parties to submit their opinions, comments and suggestions.