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IBM plans to buy Merge Healthcare in a $1 billion deal that promises to bring new image-focused capabilities to its Watson Health platform.

Pharmacists at some 7,800 CVS drugstores across the U.S. will soon be able to tap IBM's Watson cognitive computing system in the hopes of predicting customers' health problems before they arise.

A group has been singled out as the attacker behind the recently disclosed hack against Anthem, believed to be the largest waged against a health care company.

Wearable devices could be key to improving health, caring for patients with chronic diseases and understanding the impact of treatments. But there's one snag: how do you get people to wear them?

Doctors find little value in the way activity data from patients' wearables is presented to them today.

The clinical data warehouse used to represent what was wrong with healthcare IT: An incomplete data source that was siloed to boot. But Texas Children's Hospital has turned its data warehouse into a valuable tool for clinical and operational analytics.

Typical medical laboratory reports could hardly be less personal. Whether they're for basic blood work or a battery of tests for serious disease, the black-and-white printouts of results--presenting a sea of cryptic abbreviations and numbers--remain largely indecipherable to the patients whose health depends upon them.

Senior officials in the healthcare sector took aim at the tech companies that provide electronic health records (EHR) yesterday, saying that many of those vendors employ proprietary standards and deceptive strategies to lock providers into their products and keep systems from communicating with one another.

WASHINGTON -- If health technology is ever going to achieve the goal of lowering the rates of prescription drug abuse, developers and policy makers will have to do more to encourage adoption of electronic prescribing systems among healthcare providers.

CIOs in every industry play tug of war with their executive peers. For healthcare CIOs, the game's often even more one-sided. In addition to pulling against the marketing, operations and finance departments, among others, they can face opposition from the medical side of the business.

Telehealth stands among the healthcare industry's few technology success stories. It brings virtual care to underserved or remote locations. It gives facilities an opportunity to export expertise or, conversely, outsource costly operations. It cuts costs for healthcare systems as well as patients.