healthfinch, the healthcare IT company behind the award-winning application Swoop for prescription refill requests, has secured $7.5 million in Series A financing to build out its practice automation platform, “Charlie.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded Indigo Health Partners a three-year grant to bring telemedicine technology to hospitals in rural northern Michigan areas. 

Ford Motor Co. and Henry Ford Health System are co-sponsoring an innovation challenge that seeks and rewards employees who team up to develop smart-phone apps, wearable devices or in-vehicle systems that extend healthcare to the confines of the car. 

Thanks to a contract modification, military health records can now be stored in Cerner's data centers rather than government data centers. 

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) released the 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA) —a catalog of existing and emerging standards and implementation specifications developed and used to meet specific interoperability needs. 

A $10 million National Science Foundation research project will work to improve the patient data security and user confidentiality of mobile health tools.

2016 will be the year U.S. healthcare seriously reckons with consolidation, much of it brought on by Obamacare, as mergers and acquisitions continue among providers, payers and industry players—and as regulators assert their power to stem or encourage the tide.

More and more healthcare stakeholders increased their focus on innovation over the past year, from providers to vendors to associations.