Following several reports, including one from The ECRI Institute, a patient safety organization, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has recognized voluntary interoperability standards for medical devices in a notice published in the Federal Register on Aug. 6.

Interoperability requires mandatory and clearly executable standards and a delay in Meaningful Use to allow providers to get the processes right, according to a panel of healthcare leaders at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ 2013 eHealth Summit.

San Diego-based Palomar Health and Qualcomm Life are joining forces to explore the application of wearable computing in medicine.

A care transition intervention that directed largely existing resources to a smaller subgroup of patients with heart failure based on daily EMR-based risk stratification resulted in a reduction in overall readmissions, according to a study published in British Medical Journal Quality & Safety.

This week, Clinical Innovation + Technology brought you much more coverage from the recent mHealth + Telehealth World Congress 2013, which covered exciting developments in this area of healthcare.

About 80,000 veterans took part in more than 200,000 telehealth consultations with physicians and therapists in 2012, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The telehealth program also reduced veterans’ bed days by 58 percent and admissions by 38 percent, according to an article published in Military.com.

Patient Fusion, an online health platform, announced the launch of the mobile medical appointment booking that will be available for free to the estimated 14 million newly insured Americans under Obamacare.

Boise, IDAHO and Arlington, VA, July 31, 2013 -- When it comes to collaborative care and sharing critical patient data, not all information is created equal. To help solve the most persistent interoperability barriers in every healthcare setting, Inofile is combining its leadership in capturing and transforming unstructured content with Surescripts’ national clinical health information network to advance healthcare.