Morning Headlines 12/6/17

Advocate plans to merge with Wisconsin hospital giant Aurora

Advocate Health Care (IL) announces plans to merge with Aurora Health Care (WI) in a deal that will create the tenth-largest not-for-profit system. Under terms of the merger, neither system will pay the other cash, and the combined health system, to be called Advocate Aurora Health, will have 27 hospitals and $11 billion in annual revenue.

More than Half of All Healthcare Providers in the US are Connected Electronically through the Carequality Interoperability Framework

The Sequoia Project announces that more than 1,000 hospitals, 25,000 clinics, and 580,000 healthcare providers are connected through the Carequality interoperability framework, representing more than 50% of all healthcare providers in the country.

DeepVariant: Highly Accurate Genomes With Deep Neural Networks

Google releases DeepVariant, an open-source deep learning tool that analyzes genome data with significantly greater accuracy than previous methods.

Emergency rooms are monopolies. Patients pay the price.

A year-long investigative study on the use of emergency department facility fees concludes that costs climbed “89 percent between 2009 and 2015, rising twice as fast as the price of outpatient health care, and four times as fast as overall health care spending. Overall spending on emergency room fees rose by more than $3 billion.”