While healthcare costs continued to rise at other facilities, one Netherlands hospital was able to lower costs by 8 percent in a single year while improving quality. The credit goes to a value-based care strategy focusing on everything from closer coordination on cardiovascular patients to keeping more experienced physicians in the emergency department. 

ReWalk Robotic, producers of wearable robotic exoskeletons for patients with spinal cord injuries, has been commissioned by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to provide 28 exoskeleton system to be used in a multi-center clinical trial. 

 HIMSS saw a spike in healthcare leaders’ interest in interoperability education at the 2017 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition, according to attendance data from the event. Compared to HIMSS16, attendance more than doubled at the redesigned HIMSS Interoperability Showcase™, a 34,000-square-foot exhibition displaying, in real-time, the exchange and use of data through interoperability profiles and standards with live products currently in the marketplace.

A recent study, published in Lancet Respiratory Medicine, examined a point-of-care testing strategy capable of providing test results within an hour, dramatically speeding up the time between diagnosis and administering treatment. 

Vaccines prevent measles, mumps and chicken pox—but researchers have a new target. A new vaccine, being developed by scientists at the University of California, San Diego, hopes to prevent acne. 

Innovaccer Inc., a Silicon Valley-based healthcare analytics company, announced that the Mercy Accountable Care Organization, one of the largest ACOs in the state of Iowa, has chosen Innovaccer’s proprietary platform ‘Datashop’ to drive end-to-end value-based care initiatives in their organisation. 

Expanding Medicare’s coverage of telehealth services has been a favorite cause of major medical associations. A new U.S. Senate bill is taking a different approach to achieving that goal: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI).

The next head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT will be Donald Rucker, MD, a choice the industry was quick to praise once word of the pick leaked on March 31 due to an updated listing in the HHS employee directory.