The following vendor contracts were announced within the past week.

People love to talk about big data. But people across all industries seem to offer different definitions of what big data actually is.

An initial group of providers is now live on MetroChicago Health Information Exchange.

Irving, Texas-based Novation and Irvine, Calif.-based Edwards Lifesciences have entered a distribution agreement providing Novation members with Edwards' heart valve therapies.

As reimbursement is now tied to quality metrics including readmission, hospitals and health systems are placing a concentrated effort on ensuring patients go home and stay home. Innovative technologies are largely helping this effort and reducing readmission while increasing patient…

Last week, Apple updated its app review guidelines to prohibit HealthKit apps from storing users' health information in iCloud, just before news broke that hackers had stolen hundreds of private celebrity photos off the cloud-based storage service.

President Obama announced Thursday Megan Smith will become the nation's third CTO.

Many aspects of CMS' annual proposed modifications to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, released in July, were warmly welcomed by health IT stakeholders, such as expanded Medicare reimbursement for telemedicine services.

Hackers successfully accessed a HealthCare.gov server in July and were able to upload malicious software, HHS disclosed Thursday. The breach was discovered last week during a manual review of the website's security logs.

This week, CMS issued a final rule granting providers the flexibility in meaningful use attestation the agency had originally proposed back in May and finalizing the extension of stage 2 through 2016 for providers that started attesting in 2011 or 2012.