CHICAGO—When Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP, took the podium at the 2014 Healthcare Leadership Forum, she began with a call to improve handoffs in healthcare. “Making transitions safer is a national patient safety goal,” said Arora, who is associate professor of medicine and director of the Graduate Medical Education Clinical Learning Environment Innovation at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, citing the Joint Commission. “But really, it’s a requirement.”

CHICAGO—Teaching self-management skills is an important part of patient care across the continuum, according to David Baker, MD’s presentation, “Literacy, Numeracy, and Improving Care in the Chronically Ill," at the 2014 Healthcare Leadership Forum. Baker, chief of the Division of Medicine General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, pointed out that for communications to make a difference in patient outcomes, they need to be at a level patients understand.

CHICAGO—Information exchange is increasing partly due to lowering of barriers such as governance and trust, said J. Marc Overhage, MD, PhD, speaking at the Healthcare Leadership Forum on Sept. 30. Currently CMIO of Siemens Healthcare, Overhage previously was founding CEO of the Indiana HIE.

Big data can offer insight on patients’ diagnoses and possible complications in a way that is much less costly and time-consuming than clinical trials, reports New York Times Magazine.

DEERFIELD, Ill.--Walgreens (NYSE: WAG) (Nasdaq: WAG) today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to improve care coordination and integrate immunization records for more than 8.5 million VA-enrolled patients.

A virtual ward model of care showed no impact on readmissions or deaths 30 days or 90 days, 6 months or 1 year after hospital discharge, according to a University of Toronto study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

This week was the third annual Healthcare Leadership Forum, which focused on leveraging evidence across the care continuum. To that end, many of the speakers at the two-day event had nursing and public health backgrounds that show how healthcare is really starting to look beyond face-to-face physician encounters.

Venture funding invested into the digital health sector has surpassed $3 billion through the first three quarters of 2014, which is a 100 percent increase over 2013, according to the latest report from Rock Health.