Not all of us are blessed with a green thumb. But if you want to add some greenery to your home office or learn to appreciate those nature walks a little more, there's an app for that. NatureID is the top plant identification app on the market, and you can get it for a special price as part of our Presidents' Day sale, running 2/17 through 2/20 at 11:59p.m. NatureID has more than 8 million downloads on the App Store and has earned a 4.6/5-star rating. Using AI, the app can identify more than 14,000 plant species, diagnose their health, and give you specified care advice to help you better care for your plants. It will help you choose the right soil, set the right watering schedule, fertilize plants properly, and more, thanks to input from expert botanists.

If you're a healthcare professional, you should really get up to speed in everything AI. Because the truth is, AI is already starting to revolutionize the way we deliver healthcare, and the opportunities for improvement are only going to continue to grow. Let's start by taking a look at some of the ways AI is already making a difference in healthcare: As you can see, the potential for AI to improve healthcare is vast. But in order to truly realize the benefits of AI, healthcare professionals need to be willing to embrace it and incorporate it into their practices. So if you're a healthcare professional looking to stay ahead of the curve, now is the time to start learning about AI and how it can benefit your practice.

As providers look for more ways to add efficiencies, produce better patient outcomes and reduce costs, many are turning to partnerships with large technology companies. On July 20, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center announced that the health system would enter a five-year partnership with Microsoft to better utilize data the provider collects throughout its 40 hospitals. UPMC's clinical teams will have access to Microsoft's cloud computing, artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools to improve patient care. The two companies will work together to mine more than 13 petabytes of clinical data and 18 petabytes of imaging data with the goal of creating actionable insights for care teams. Previously, UPMC has leveraged data to identify higher-risk patients pulling information from more than 1 million surgical procedures.

When healthcare organizations have a CC&C strategy that works across departments and is developed with input from both IT and clinical stakeholders, they will see success. Northwell Health, for example, began a move to Microsoft Teams in 2019, laying the foundation for the large system that serves the New York City metro area to build out a HIPAA-compliant, seamless solution that could help with clinical decision-making and patient management. Northwell also launched an intelligent virtual assistant called Nora to complement Teams. "Our vision was to be able to get the information at your fingertips when you need it, quickly and even through voice interaction," Northwell Health's Deputy CIO Sophy Lu told HealthTech. When clinicians have better access to patient information and have the tools to organize in-depth coordination, they can deliver more holistic care to patients.

Healthcare organizations are under consistent, heavy pressure to manage their costs, but patients also have a big role to play in managing healthcare costs by working to take better care of themselves. But what can stakeholders do to get many, if not most, patients to take on that responsibility? That's the question Kumar Srinivas, CTO for the health plan group at NTT DATA, a data management services provider, takes up in a recent commentary at Forbes. In his view, while it's obvious there is little health plans can do to force their patients to improve their preventative health regimens, there are things that can be done to "nudge" them along the same path. He cites a recent book co-authored by an economist and a law professor that describes how people can be "nudged" to make better decisions on a range of personal issues.

As healthcare providers have faced unprecedented workloads (individually and institutionally) around the world, the pandemic response continues to cause seismic shifts in how, where, and when care is provided. Longer-term, it has revealed the need for fundamental shifts across the care continuum. As a physician, I have seen first-hand the challenges of not having the right data, at the right time, in the right format to make informed shared decisions with my patients. These challenges amplify the urgency for trusted partners and solutions to help solve emergent health challenges. Today we're taking a big step forward to address these challenges with the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

While technologies that impede, rather than enhance care, have made the healthcare industry somewhat skeptical of innovation, a shift toward patient-centric care is changing the game. Healthtech innovations in 2019 are helping to transform the business of care, creating efficiencies, cutting costs, and providing better outcomes. How these new technologies mesh with the clinical skill set of a medical provider is still being determined. Providers who embrace tools now available will help to determine how healthcare delivery looks in 2020 and well beyond. Here's what you need to know: If you aren't offering your patients virtual visits, it's likely they'll find someone who is Virtual visits, often conducted via a smartphone or personal computer, offer convenient access to care, saving patients the time and expense of traveling to an appointment and providing care to those who have limited access to it.

What is the best way to treat a stroke? It's no secret: you send for an emergency doctor immediately. Step two: the patient is sent for a CT or MRI scan, and if he or she is eligible for catheter treatment, it starts immediately after the diagnosis has been made. Then, everything possible should be done to prevent a further stroke. If we know this, why is it so difficult to implement?

The doctor enters and pulls up the electronic medical record. The patient's history is already there. The doctor drags and drops the image, presses the "analyze" button. An actionable diagnosis appears a moment later. If artificial intelligence (AI) were to one day take over much of clinical practice, as some fear or anticipate -- being potentially faster, more reliable, and generally better at certain tasks than humans -- clinical decisions may no longer depend on tired eyes, imperfect risk scores, or lagging guidelines.

The original 1960s Star Trek series took place in a universe of the future with personal communicators, holograms, and the technology to send humans beyond our solar system. In many ways that future is here. We have smartphones, virtual reality, space travel -- and now the tricorder. In the show, the tricorder was a handheld medical device that could scan a patient, read his or her vital signs, and diagnose problems in minutes. A working prototype invented by a Philadelphia-based emergency room physician Basil Harris may not look like the ones used by Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy and Commander Beverly Crusher throughout the sci-fi series, but it's advanced enough to offer a medical diagnosis in minutes and anyone can use it.