ORLANDO--Five percent of patients consume 43 percent of total healthcare costs. To drive down expenditures, the healthcare industry needs to target the most chronically ill patients, who are managed by multiple physicians and often take as many as 25 prescription medications, said Mark T. Bertolini, chairman, CEO and president of Aetna in his keynote speech at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society annual meeting.

It’s the first official day of HIMSS14 but we attended several of the pre-conference symposia yesterday to get you up to speed on the latest health IT news. Here’s what you need to know.

ORLANDO—Patient engagement is not a goal, it’s a strategy, according to a lecture delivered during the Physicians’ IT Symposium ahead of the Health Information and Management Systems Society's annual conference.

ORLANDO–-When it comes to interoperability, “build in incremental steps and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” said Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, chief science officer, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's pre-conference Interoperability Symposium.

Samsung Electronics and the University of California-San Francisco will partner to accelerate validation and commercialization of promising new sensors, algorithms and digital health technologies for preventive health solutions by establishing the UCSF-Samsung Digital Health Innovation Lab.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services plans to create a centralized database to help providers determine public health agencies and registries' readiness to receive patient data from certified EHRs.

Skaneateles Falls, NY, USA, February 17, 2014 -- Welch Allyn, a leading medical diagnostic device company that delivers pragmatic innovation at the point of care, today announced it has partnered with seca , global leader in medical measuring and weighing systems, to enable wireless automated interface between the Welch Allyn Connex® Vital Signs Monitor (VSM) and seca scales and measuring devices with the seca 360° system. The partnership allows Welch Allyn to offer for the first time a wirelessly connected weight and height patient data solution for both physician and hospital customers in low-acuity settings.

A new white paper from HEALTHeLINK, the western New York clinical information exchange, finds that a little effort to reduce unnecessary duplicative CT scans could have saved $1.3 million and radiation exposure to patients during one six-month period.