HIMSS 2018 is creeping up and I am sure your head is about to be spinning with booths, elevator pitches, and more swag than your suit jacket pockets could ever hope to hold.

Adopting innovative technologies in healthcare is something that has the power to transform care delivery, but it's also something that requires intensive thought, analysis, and planning. But above all, innovation adoption requires leadership that deeply understands the pain points and needs of the providers and patients they serve.

Last year was a discouraging one for healthcare data security, and this year seems to be off to a rocky start as well. With attacks becoming more commonplace and damaging—and with medical information more valuable than ever—healthcare organizations are beginning to put a greater and much-needed focus on protecting patient data. 

Last week, we kicked off our "Leaders in Innovation" blog series with a spotlight on Roy Rosin of PennMedicine. The goal of this series is to hear from the actual people driving the adoption of innovative technologies in healthcare—and learn about the initiatives they're most excited about in 2018.   

The Washington Post headline was chilling: “CDC gets list of forbidden words: Fetus, transgender, diversity.”

Could there be censorship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)? How could the federal agency charged with improving the overall health of the public operate effectively while banning scientifically precise (yet politically volatile) words like “fetus”, "evidence-based" and “transgender?”

The advancement of healthcare hinges upon leaders that are forward thinking, ambitious, and attuned to the needs of the populations they serve. Balancing the requests of providers with the needs of patients is no small task, which is why leading healthcare organizations rely on their Chief Innovation Officer to listen, evaluate, and guide them toward implementing the tools that will strengthen and advance their quality of care. 

In announcing its deal to acquire Aetna, CVS Health President and CEO Larry J. Merlo promised that they will “remake the consumer health experience” by merging the analytics of Aetna with the human touch of CVS. The resulting business promises to “provide consumers with a better experience, reduced costs, and improved access to health care experts.”

This post is excerpted from our whitepaper "The Bottleneck Problem: How Traditional Integration Stifles Innovation and Prohibits Health Systems from Maximizing Return on their EHR Investment". 

Building technology that has anything to do with healthcare can be a daunting task for developers—every system you connect to might have a different way of sending data (TCP, MLLP, HTTP, SFTP, etc) and a different format for the data itself (HL7v2, FHIR, JSON, XML, PDF, etc).

Back in June, Redox put on the Redoxathon, our first developer-focused event that gave hands-on support to groups looking to connect to our sandbox EHR environments. The day-long event was hosted by our friends at MATTER in Chicago, and it was a big success—groups got connected, data was exchanged, and to be honest, a lot of fun was had. 

We took our Bad Ass Women in Health Tech series on the road to interview Dr. Vonda Wright at Health:Further in Nashville, Tennessee. She's the Medical Director for UPMC's Lemieux Sports Center, a pioneer sports medicine researcher, and lauded public speaker. Beyond that, Dr. Wright is one of the few female orthopedic surgeons in the country—and has authored five books as well. 

Incubators and accelerators have become prominent within health tech due to their obvious and quick-to-realize value—they help bring people together and give fledgling companies access to otherwise-hard-to-obtain resources. Back in our startup days, Redox participated in a few accelerators, and we're no strangers to incubators either.