Here's the latest roundup of stories about 17 health information technology companies, including Cerner, Verily and IBM.
1. A machine learning tool from Verily, Alphabet's life sciences arm, can predict the presence of biomarkers of disease development and progression more accurately than other state-of-the-art tools.
2. Garmin Health and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced a partnership on May 29 that will provide Garmin wearable devices and health tracking metrics at a discount to BCBS members nationwide.
3. HP has partnered with Israeli cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct to stop the spread of cyberattacks.
4. Cerner launched its Social Determinants Innovation Collaborative, which aims to tackle social determinants of health such as food insecurity, housing, transportation and access to healthcare.
5. Talkspace, a New York City-based telebehavioral health startup, announced this week the close of its $50 million Series D funding round and a new partnership with UnitedHealth Group's Optum.
6. IBM's global head of blockchain for financial services and digital currencies Jesse Lund abruptly left the company.
7. Roni Zeiger, MD, who served as Google's chief health strategist for six years, is joining Facebook as head of health strategy.
8. Walmart named Suresh Kumar, a former Google, Amazon and Microsoft executive, as the company's new chief technology and chief development officer.
9. ZeOmega, a Plano, Texas-based provider of population health management technology, released a new artificial intelligence-enabled solution to identify and manage opioid abuse populations.
10. Facebook has been quietly working on developing a cryptocurrency that is scheduled to launch in several countries in the first quarter of 2020.
11. JPMorgan Chase developed a privacy feature for ethereum-based blockchains that hides the financial details of the transaction.
12. Change Healthcare submitted an amended S-1 filing, upsizing its initial public offering to $200 million from the $100 million it filed for in March.
13. Epic will construct a $21 million underground power line at its Verona, Wis.-based 1,100-acre campus due to its growing electricity needs, which the EHR vendor expects to double in the next decade.
14. Epic launched American Well's virtual care platform in its App Orchard.
15. Baltimore city officials that turned to Gmail accounts as a workaround after being hit with a ransomware attack May 7 had their email accounts disabled by Google.
16. Medical Informatics Engineering, a medical records service provider, agreed to pay the Office for Civil Rights at HHS $100,000 to settle a HIPAA breach.
17. Microsoft's latest blockchain project is called the Identity Overlay Network, which is designed to complete thousands of transactions per second.