Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/cfh6lx/telemedicine_and) has announced the addition of Wintergreen Research, Inc's new report "Telemedicine and M-Health Convergence: Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2013 to 2019"to their offering.

SSM Health Care–St. Louis and Healthcare Clinic at select Walgreens (NYSE: WAG) (Nasdaq: WAG) will launch a collaboration in January 2014 that will improve access to care and increase care coordination for patients.

The United States may be losing ground as the leader in biomedical research and within the next five years will be second to China in the funds it spends for R&D, according to Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D, director of the National Institutes of Health.

Best Practice Partners (BPP), a leader in health IT optimization, is pleased to announce a new division which will focus on assisting payers and providers optimize their existing Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and assist in standing up new ACOs. The division will operate as a federated partnership, drawing on the complimentary skills and expertise of individuals and organizations representing Best Practices for each of the strategic components which go into building a successful ACO.

Advances in speech recognition have helped streamline transcription and recording of patient encounters. Most developments have been in back-end speech recognition, or systems that generate text from dictations that transcriptionists and editors correct and process. But there has been recent growth in front-end speech recognition, which involves systems that require providers to edit the transcribed text immediately after dictating.

As health IT leaders make their way to New York for the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) Digital Health Conference, certain trends are emerging that will define healthcare in 2014. Practice Fusion, the nation's largest healthcare platform, looks at these key trends from 2013 and predicts what they might mean looking forward. With the ongoing Meaningful Use incentive push for health technology and the recent difficulty of many vendors to deliver on new and upcoming requirements, it's looking to be a big year for upheaval in the health IT sector.

Quantia, a leader in Physician Relationship Management, has introduced the industry’s first virtual Marketplace for its physician community—QuantiaMD—that will connect physicians to products and services that can benefit their practice.

Novant Health and doxo today announced Novant Health has launched on doxo to deliver bills, simplify the patient experience and eliminate unnecessary costs across all thirteen of its hospitals. Novant Health patients can now receive and pay their healthcare statements, as well as organize EOB’s and other documents that surround episodes of care, directly from their free personal doxo account – online or through their doxo mobile app.