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The company continued its shopping spree on Friday, scooping up another security-centric vendor, in hopes of moving into healthcare and other regulated vertical markets.

The patient engagement market is at a "standoff," according to a new Chilmark report. Providers are relying on vendors to lead the way with new tools, but those companies "have been reactive, not proactive" in helping them meet their needs.

There have been many ideas proposed as solutions for reducing costly hospital readmissions, but one concept that hasn't gotten much attention over the years is patient empowerment -- the practice of letting people take control of their healthcare. Mobile devices make it more possible than ever.

It seems that the apparent failure of current EHRs to accommodate patients as unique cases has sparked a shift in attitude in the health IT industry. Some insiders say the issue may not be so much the failure of EHRs, as their falling short of unduly high expectations from users and the vendors themselves.

Stage 2 of the Meaningful Use Program requires that at least 5 percent of patients view, download, and transmit their health information and send a secure electronic message to their provider. But this objective, lowered from 10 percent, still worries the healthcare community.

Axial Exchange, a developer of patient engagement technologies, unveiled this week its Patient Engagement Index, which ranks U.S. hospitals based on how involved their patient communities are with their own care.

Axial Exchange has acquired mRemedy, a mobile healthcare platform founded by Mayo Clinic and Minneapolis-based DoApp.

"I think open source is the right thing to do the same way I believe science is better than alchemy," software pioneer Linus Torvald, who developed the "kernel" that's the basis of the Linux operating system, has said. "Like science, open source allows people to build on a solid base of previous knowledge…. It's just a superior way of working together."