Here's the latest roundup of stories about health information technology companies, including Allscripts, Apple and Google.
- Cerner is offering select health systems and research organizations access to anonymous COVID-19 patient data to help support epidemiological studies, clinical trials and medical treatments for the virus.
- Change Healthcare is making its application programming interfaces available for free to help health plans comply with the CMS interoperability and patient access final rule.
- Optum is pursuing a $470 million deal to buy New York-based virtual therapy provider AbleTo, which is experiencing a significant uptick in usage during the pandemic.
- Microsoft worked with Adaptive Biotechnologies to launch an initiative to map and measure immune response to COVID-19 for the improvement of diagnostics and reliable testing.
- Amazon Web Services teamed up with Yale School of Public Health and nonprofit consortium Volunteer Surge to recruit and train 1 million volunteer healthcare workers online.
- A group of private and nonprofit organizations, including Microsoft and the American Hospital Association, are launching an app called Protecting People Everywhere that will provide personal protective equipment to hospitals.
- Apple and Google's jointly developed COVID-19 contact-tracing system will prohibit the use of location tracking.
- Allscripts subsidiary CarePort Health analyzed deidentified EHR data on COVID-19 patients to find about 1 in 10 middle-aged patients hospitalized with COVID-19 do not survive.
- Google's Verily is working with Rite Aid to expand its online program for coronavirus testing to sites beyond California to eight additional states.
- Microsoft is collaborating with Imprivata on new digital identity projects for use in healthcare.
- A flaw was found in Apple's iPhones that makes the email software vulnerable to hackers.
- Google Cloud's machine-learning models blocked 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19 scams during a one-week period.
- Amazon Web Services made its enterprise search service, Amazon Kendra, generally available to organizations to index their internal data sources and make their data more searchable, the company announced May 11.
- Apple Maps developed a feature that will show users the nearest COVID-19 testing sites.
- Allscripts introduced additional hospital system solutions and services aimed to help healthcare providers' workflow during the pandemic.
- Epic waived fees for eight of its applications, allowing hospitals and health systems to install them without extra costs.
- Cerner experienced a net decrease in market share for the first time since 2010, according to a KLAS Research report.