Before delving into an EHR customization project, hospitals and health systems should consider various factors in order to set up their organization for success.

Minneapolis-based Allina Health partnered with Excel Medical, a medical device integration and analytics company, and will join its innovation program geared toward enhancing Epic EHR workflows.

Australia's Queensland public hospitals experienced EHR downtime Sept. 10 due to a routine Cerner software patch, Brisbane Times reports.

Top U.S. tech companies were unimpressed by a plan White House officials unveiled Sept. 10 to direct $973.5 million toward government agencies' nondefense artificial intelligence research for the fiscal year ending September 2020, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Direct-to-consumer DNA tests, which make it easy for anyone to learn the identity of blood relatives who may have wanted to stay anonymous, are challenging sperm banks' longstanding assurances of identity protection, STAT reports.

Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger Health System and the IBM Data Science Elite team announced Sept. 10 a collaboration to develop an artificial intelligence model to detect sepsis mortality risk.

Tempus, a Chicago-based biotech startup building a massive library of clinical and molecular data and an accompanying machine learning-powered analytics platform, has recently poached leaders from leading healthcare institutions, STAT reports.

Dr. David Jacofsky is founder and CEO The CORE Institute and HOPCo, a Phoenix-based orthopedic practice and practice management organization.

EHR vendors Epic and Cerner have each recently unveiled initiatives that aim to propel the use of de-identified patient data for medical research.

Grand Rapids-based Metro Health — University of Michigan Health implemented a clinical communication application for clinicians to help reduce stroke time to treatment from 53 minutes to 29 minutes.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced the five finalists in its Data Innovation Challenge, in which digital health startups were tasked with developing claims data-based approaches to reducing costs and improving outcomes.

Fifty-one members of the Business Roundtable, an association of the CEOs of top U.S. companies, urged congressional leaders in a Sept. 10 letter to pass a "comprehensive consumer data privacy law."

Four of the top vendors hospitals use to participate in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program are Allscripts, Cerner, Epic and Meditech, according to 2018 ONC data.

Several menstrual cycle-tracking mobile apps share sensitive information with Facebook without user consent, a new Privacy International report found.

It requires much more than being tech savvy to have a successfully IT team within a hospital or health system. Rather, experts say these team members need to have compassion, flexibility and be patient focused.

Amazon Web Services released its Quantum Ledger Database, a fully managed database designed to provide transparent, immutable and cryptographically verifiable transactions logs, according to a Sept. 10 AWS post.

The use of mobile health apps is on the rise, and the National Institute of Health has taken note by increasing its funding for developing, testing and implementing of apps to $39.4 million, according to an American Medical Association post.

Insurers may be encouraging ransomware attacks because these companies continue to pay attackers, according to a ProPublica investigation and cited by the HIPAA Journal.

Apple revealed Sept. 10 that it will conduct three new medical studies in partnership with academic and research institutions.

It has become too common to produce software that may meet certain functional requirements but ignores the experience clinicians will have using it. A more human-centered design approach begins with understanding the problems that need to be solved and why, to enable better technology and an optimal experience for users. People who are designing and building technology must be connected with the people who use it.