The strength of Cigna's (NYSE: CI) chronic condition support programs has been recognized by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. Cigna has received NCQA Patient and Practitioner Oriented Disease Management (DM) Accreditation for asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, depression, and diabetes.

Inovalon, Inc., a leading provider of data-driven healthcare solutions, today announced that Greenway Medical Technologies, Inc. has entered into a multi-year engagement that enables Inovalon's advanced healthcare data analytics for payers and providers to leverage Greenway's PrimeSUITE electronic health record (EHR) platform, further enabling improvements in clinical and quality outcomes, and financial performance.

Healthcare organizations have large amounts of data but often do not have the tools to bring the data together for useful business information and planning. Healthcare analytics is the systematic use of data and related business insights developed through applied analytical disciplines such as, statistical, contextual, quantitative, predictive, cognitive, other including emerging model to drive fact-based decision making for planning, management, measurement and learning. Analytics may be descriptive, predictive or prescriptive.

GNS Healthcare today announced that U.S. Patent 8,571,803, entitled "Systems and Methods for Modeling and Analyzing Networks," has been issued, relating to significant innovations in automated causal data analytics.  The patent covers key methods underlying REFS(TM), a computational platform that automatically builds predictive and explanatory models from big data.

ECRI Institute, a nonprofit that researches the best approaches to patient care, announces a new agreement with Data Leverage Group, which specializes in value analysis workflow solutions for hospitals and health systems.

Meditab Software Inc., known for its award-winning Intelligent Medical Software (IMS) integrated EHR, practice management, patient portal and reporting solutions, is guaranteeing that IMS will be ICD-10 ready by February 15, 2014, and they are backing that guarantee up with a money-back policy.

AHIMA CONFERENCE--Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced a significant enhancement to its Clintegrity 360 platform that integrates clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and computer-assisted coding (CAC) into one seamless process. This single, web-based solution creates a natural and efficient way for clinicians to create more complete and accurate clinical documentation, while supporting downstream revenue cycle and quality reporting processes. Nuance Clintegrity 360 will be demonstrated in booth #1226 at the 2013 American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Convention & Exhibits October 27 – 30.

The Affordable Care Act’s goal to promote reforms to the "overpriced, underperforming" U.S. healthcare system is often overlooked in the healthcare debate sweeping the country right now, argues New York Times op-ed columnist Bill Keller.