Minnesota-based multinational conglomerate 3M has acquired speech recognition software developer M*Modal for $1 billion, according to a report by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. M*Modal provides healthcare technology and conversational AI-powered systems for transcribing doctors’ verbal notes.

After a delay, Cigna has closed its $67 billion acquisition of Express Scripts, the company confirmed on Dec. 20.

Women living with chronic health problems tend to put off screening for breast cancer, possibly due to treatment fatigue, according to a study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital and published online Dec. 19 in the Journal of Women’s Health.

Obese patients who undergo x-ray imaging face more than double the risk of cancer from radiation than that of ‘normal-weight’ people, according to a new U.K.-based study published in the Journal of Radiological Protection.

The shift to value-based care made significant headway in 2017, according to a new survey from the Health Care Transformation Task Force that found nearly half of their business was in value-based payment arrangements by the end of the year.

“We knew imaging would come back because there’s virtually nothing in health care that can happen without an image anymore,” Travis Singleton, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Merritt Hawkins, told the American Medical Association (AMA).

Though the use of deep-learning techniques has the potential to change several areas of medicine, the technology faces numerous challenges before it can be applied more broadly, according to a viewpoint article published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Roughly 3 in 10 Americans don’t seek medical care because they can’t afford it, according to a recent Gallup poll.