Here are 11 key headlines from health IT companies.
1. IBM launched a healthcare arm called IBM Watson Health, which will create a cloud to analyze medical data and provide insight into population health and medical trends. IBM is joined by Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic in a first wave of its Watson Health partnerships.
2. Microsoft announced four U.S. winners of its 2015 Microsoft Health Innovation Awards: Children's Specializes Hospital in Mountainside, N.J.; Community Healthcare System in Munster, Ind., won the patient engagement awards, Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City won the operations and workflow award and Cardiovascular Center of Marin in Larkspur, Calif., won the productivity and mobility award.
3. MEDITECH partnered with Nuance Communications and Intelligent Medical Objects to help translate physician notes into clinically accurate data in the EHR system. The program is intended to translate unstructured narrative writing into usable, accurate data in MEDITECH's EHR.
4. Cerner will partner with Geisinger and xG Health to use SMART-on-FHIR standards to use software applications across open-platform EHRs. SMART on FHIR is a new draft standard that allows software applications to be use on open-platform EHR systems.
5. athenahealth will waive the data exchange fees for its clients, offering CommonWell's services to its 62,000 clients for free. Epic announced it will also waive its networking fee.
6. Surescripts, a national e-prescription service, launched a record locator service on the Carequality interoperability network, which serves eClinicalWorks, Epic and Greenway Health.
7. Hackensack Medical Center linked its Epic EHR to its Omnicell automated pharmacy system.
8. Quality Systems, the parent company of NextGen Healthcare, was sued for an alleged case of retaliatory firing.
9. Trinity Health in Livonia, Mich., selected athenahealth's EHR, practice management and patient engagements solutions for some of its physician offices.
10. Epic brought 2,700 employees to the HIMSS15 Annual Conference & Exhibition in Chicago from April 12 – 16. The company took the opportunity of the conference being so close to its Verona, Wis., headquarters to send many of its employees to educational sessions and the exhibition floor.
11. Cerner, Advocate Health Care and Advocate Health Partners plan to expand their partnership to combine Cerner's EHR with Advocate's population health expertise.