• Provider-focused telemedicine vendor SnapMD’s Virtual Care Management system will be used to teach students at the University of San Diego (USD) Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science about telehealth. In a class called “Telehealth and Emerging Technology”, students will learn the ins and outs of virtual visits.

“Telehealth is an emerging area of healthcare that is shown to not only expand access to care but provide care at a lower cost,” Dr. Jonathan Mack, director of the Health Care Informatics and Nursing Informatics programs at UCD, said in a statement. “Many health systems are either implementing or readying to implement telehealth systems, which provide hands-on opportunities for our Health Care Informatics program graduates. By equipping our students with proper telehealth training through SnapMD’s VCM software platform, they will be better equipped to deliver care as they emerge as future nursing leaders.”

• Miami, Florida’s Jackson Health System is expanding its partnership with Boston-based software company CarePort Health. CarePort’s discharge planning and referral management platforms, which integrates with Jackson’s Cerner EHR, will be deployed at six hospitals, medical centers and long-term care facilities in the Miami area.

“At Jackson Health System, we strive to provide our patients with the highest level of quality care possible. In order to achieve this goal, we applied a highly-innovative strategy by designing and building the integration between these two disparate and unconnected systems,” Michael Garcia, SVP and CIO at Jackson Health System, said in a statement. “This integration has enabled us to improve the delivery of quality patient care while also enhancing clinician satisfaction through the use of this innovative technology.”

• Advanced ICU Care is deepening its relationship with St. Louis’s Gordon Hospital, part of the Adventist Health System, by adding remote telemetry monitoring on top of their existing telehealth-based relationship. The company will provide 24-7 monitoring of cardiac patients at the hospital.

"Delivering the highest quality patient care is a top priority at Gordon Hospital," Amy Jordon, Gordon’s chief nursing officer, said in a statement. "By implementing Advanced ICU Care's 24/7 telemetry monitoring services into our hospital facilities, our nurses are able to focus on providing care to patients while, as an organization, allowing us to optimize monitoring of our patients at risk for cardiac events.”

• Three hospitals in Sioux Falls, South Dakota’s Avera Health System are adopting new software for prenatal health monitoring. Avera McKennan Hospital and University Health Center in Sioux Falls; Avera Sacred Heart Hospital in Yankton; and Avera St. Luke's Hospital in Aberdeen will all deploy software from PeriWatch, an FDA-cleared and NIH-validated tool for monitoring and interpreting fetal heart rate patterns.

"National studies show that more than half of the bad outcomes in childbirth are preventable and often relate to delayed recognition of troubling signs," PeriGen CEO Matthew Sappern said in a statement. "Responsibly, Avera wants its clinicians across the spectrum of its facilities to have the very best opportunities and controls to intervene in a timely fashion, and the PeriGen platform provides just that.”

• Amiko Digital Health, a London-based maker of connected drug delivery devices, has inked a deal with Luz Saúde, one of the largest healthcare provider groups in Portugal. Doctors at Luz Saúde will use Amiko’s Respiro inhaler sensor in care of their asthma and COPD patients.

“Our partnership with Luz Saúde is a testament to the unique flexibility of Respiro to effectively integrate into drastically different healthcare structures and deliver system-wide value. The unique capabilities of our sensor technology for inhalers address a fundamental unmet need in respiratory care - the sub-optimal performance of respiratory therapies in the real world. We are thrilled to deliver Respiro with a leading European healthcare network that is dedicated to innovation and upgrade their standards of care using connected technologies” Duilio Macchi, CEO of Amiko, said in a statement.

• Garmin and Gold’s Gym will work together to pull heart rate data from Garmin devices into Gold Gym’s app, called “Gold’s Amp”. Gold’s Amp is a workout app that combines personal coaching with curated music playlists. With the integration, users can see heart rate data displayed in the app.

“We know through our many years of experience in the fitness wearables space that the importance of heart rate monitoring during exercise simply cannot be overstated,” Dan Bartel, Garmin vice president of global consumer sales, said in a statement. “Through this collaboration with Gold’s Gym, we’re excited to combine our two areas of expertise to provide a digital personal training experience like no other.”

• Post-acute telemedicine provider TripleCare will be deployed at 12 senior care facilities throughout Virginia via a partnership with Commonwealth Care of Roanoke (CCR). Three facilities will roll out in the third quarter, with the other nine coming by the end of the year.

“Our new relationship with TripleCare affords CCR the opportunity to deepen the quality of care to our patients and residents on which we have come to pride ourselves,” Honor Chriscoe, director of operational initiatives and support at CCR, said in a statement. “CCR was built on a vision and mission to deliver caring, compassionate and complete complex skilled nursing and rehabilitative services, and by aligning with TripleCare, we’re able to further strengthen both our ability to fulfill this promise as well as our commitment to deliver the best care around the clock.”

• Connected blood pressure monitor maker Qardio has announced a partnership with the Uniformed Fire Officers Association (UFOA) of New York City, offering hypertension monitoring to more of the UFOA’s 2,600 active members and 5,000 retirees. The deployment is an expansion of a successful nine-month pilot overseen by Mt. Sinai doctors.

"Home blood pressure monitoring using Qardio's Bluetooth enabled blood pressure cuff has proven to be an easy yet powerful way to have our members track their own health while doctors monitor their vitals without disrupting their lives," UFOA Vice President George Farinacci said in a statement. "Our pilot participants fully embraced this innovative solution and we now look forward to enrolling 1000 additional members into the Qardio remote monitoring program.”

• Cambridge Health Alliance, a Massachusetts health system that serves the greater Boston area, will begin to manage its chest pain patients using informatics technology from Impathiq. The company’s Heart Pathway and IQ Engine platforms offer clinical decision support in the emergency room.

“We’ve been using the Impathiq system for a few months now in three emergency departments serving about 100,000 patients a year. We’re seeing the benefits of having real-time clinical feedback for doctors and physician assistants treating patients, and we’re using the data as part of our clinical and quality assessment for making administrative decisions downstream,” Dr. Christopher Fischer, site chief of emergency medicine at CHA Cambridge and Somerville Hospitals, said in a statement.