Digital Health

Reno, Nev.-based Renown Health opened a new "care traffic control center" Aug. 2, which will use new technologies to coordinate patient care transfers, telehealth and home-based care from a single location. 

Venture-capital investments in digital health have skyrocketed since the pandemic. The trend continued in July, as investors pledged high dollar amounts to technology-driven health startups.

Here are 10 recent health IT vendor contracts and go-lives accelerating digital transformation efforts at healthcare organizations. 

UC San Francisco will house the COVID Tracking Project, a 15-month-long crowdsourced digital archive of daily COVID-19 data compiled by The Atlantic, within the university's permanent library collection, the organizations said July 28. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has created many new challenges within healthcare. Some of these challenges include shortages in critical care beds, daily strain across nursing and physician groups, delays to elective surgeries, and heightened patient-access restrictions to care facilities.

Health data company Datavant and health information management company Ciox Health finalized their $7 billion merger agreement, the companies announced July 28. 

"You can't assume that you actually know the struggles that your members face," Healthfirst CEO Pat Wang shared with Becker's July 26. "I think intellectually, we were aware of the food insecurity and other social determinants of health challenges that…

The parent company of Catalyst Health Network, a 1,000-physician network based in Plano, Texas, acquired digital health company MediBookr, according to a July 27 news release.

Payers should be focusing on creating a healthcare "ecosystem" that supports members with convenience and preventive care, said Jaime Murillo, MD, senior vice president and chief cardiometabolic health officer of UnitedHealth Group.

Nine recent partnerships between healthcare organizations and big tech companies including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.