Carestream Health has sold its healthcare IT business to Philips in 26 of the 38 countries in which Philips has operations. Around 1,000 employees have subsequently transferred to Philips. The sale means that healthcare providers across the world will have access to a greater variety of health care IT systems. This will help simplify medical image management and allow more extensive collaboration in order to improve patient care. The rest of Carestream Health’s operations will continue unaffected by the sale.

A new collaboration has come to fruition between HCL Technologies and Oracle Health Sciences. The aim is to help life sciences companies reduce the cost and the time of new drug development. They hope to achieve this by accelerating digital clinical trials using HCL’s Faster Intelligent Trials Solution, Oracle mHealth and Oracle mHealth Cloud.

Jim Streeter, Global Vice President, Product Strategy, for Oracle Health Sciences, said: “The collaboration between Oracle Health Sciences and HCL enables clinical teams to establish digitally enabled clinical trial processes and new digital trial methods such as remote patient monitoring. This is a very exciting time for the pharma industry as new technologies such as mHealth continue to accelerate clinical trials and speed time to market for patients who are waiting.”

Clinerion has partnered with Dresden International University to offer their Master’s students access to a subset of real-world data from Clinerion’s Patient Network Explorer platform to formulate as evidence in their research. By supporting the education of the next generation of clinicians and scientists it is hoped that this will enhance the wellbeing of patients.

Dr. Ben Illigens, course director, said: “We elected to partner with Clinerion because they are at the cutting edge of the use of real world data for clinical research. Clinerion data is secure, transparent, scalable and international and therefore a perfect fit for our program and for our students’ needs. In the same way that traditional drug development can be accelerated by the availability of RWE obtained from RWD, the success of this Master’s program will be accelerated by the possibility to access Clinerion RWD. We are looking forward to presenting the results of this novel collaboration.”

The Patient Access website, which allows patients to book GP appointments, order prescriptions and view their medical records online, is now running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The website can now stably handle the increased demand and web traffic spikes in the morning, protect patient’s data more effectively, and offer video consultations to those not able to easily access surgeries. A new feature, Proxy Access permits people to use the resources on behalf of another.