Here are seven recent health IT vendor contracts and go-lives accelerating digital transformation efforts at healthcare organizations. Hospitals including Boston Children's Hospital, Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai, Tampa, Fla.-based BayCare and Houston Methodist will deploy the new Alexa capability to select properties.

Northwell Health said it plans to use predictive artificial intelligence software from a Georgia-based company to help drive down patient readmissions. The software will be integrated into Northwell's electronic medical records at 15 of its hospitals. The software, created by healthcare artificial intelligence technology firm Jvion, will be used to identify at-risk patients and look for other metrics that contribute to an individual's increased risk, including social determinants such as a lack of access to transportation, as well as food and housing insecurity. Northwell said during the initial implementation, it will target readmissions and avoidable admissions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Andrew Rebhan, MBA is a health IT research consultant with Advisory Board of Washington, DC. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques allow digital systems to streamline user interactions allowing machines to read text, understand meaning, and generate narratives from existing information. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have accelerated progress in a broad range of NLP applications for healthcare, including digital assistants for clinical staff, concierge services for patients, and digital scribes to streamline documentation processes. For example, last Fall Nuance Communications released its Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant to help health care providers interact with clinical workflows using NLP and other conversational AI functionality. Nuance announced at HIMSS18 that it will integrate its virtual assistant technology into Epic's EHR.

As 2017 wound down, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant rose up to the top of Apple's App Store while Amazon's Echo Dot was its own bestseller. But some of the millions of those devices sold have already found their way into hospitals like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Northwell Health in New York, the Commonwealth Care Alliance in Boston, and Libertana Home Health in Los Angeles. "When we went from laptops to smartphones as our primary means of doing computing, that was a major paradigm shift," said John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel. "Ambient listening tools probably will replace mobile devices." Amazon is hardly alone in the market. Apple Siri, Google Home and Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana are also available. At least one hospital is already girding to implement Google Home as well.