Cognoa has entered a new partnership with Autism Learning Partners (ALP) that will provide parents with the Cognoa for Child Development app. The tool helps parents log their child’s developmental progress and offers personalized activity suggestions to help support their growth. ALP providers, meanwhile, can review the logs for evidence of autism spectrum disorder to better inform their care and a potential diagnosis.

“This partnership reflects our long-standing commitment to investing in new technologies that have the potential to expedite diagnosis of autism, thereby helping families to access needed care,” Richard Fish, CEO of ALP, said in a statement. “We are looking forward to integrating Cognoa’s solutions into ALP’s services to help parents better understand their child’s behavioral health and development and to enable our clinicians to help children at risk for autism so that indicated services can be introduced as early as possible.”

Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals has deployed LifeLink’s conversational text chatbots across its system. The technology is collecting information from patients requesting appointments online, and according to LifeLink are now handling more than 70% of the system’s digital submission volume since going live in July.

“Our patients want seamless digital experiences as part of their care experience,” Neil Gomes, EVP and chief digital officer at Jefferson Health, said in a statement. “The ability to request an appointment through the conversational technology of a chatbot is a key innovation opportunity to improve the patient experience. The LifeLink chatbots are now handling the majority of digital volume and outperforming traditional online forms by 150%, which is very significant.”

Mindfulness platform meditation.live has announced that it is launching its app in the Slack App Marketplace. The company claims this is the first wellness solution in the Slack marketplace. Users can tap into live panels, courses, classes and on-demand content. meditation.live gives users reminders to learn a new daily skill associated with mental wellbeing. It also provides an inspirational quote every day. 

“We are pleased to bring our wellness platform to one of the preeminent places where people come together to make work happen,” D Sharma, cofounder and CEO of meditation.live, said in a statement. “We believe that incorporating wellness into daily work life can have a meaningful impact on teams and companies all over the world.”

Advantia Health, a tech-enabled women’s health startup, inked a deal with West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources to provide the former’s lactation app, Pacify, to mothers in the nutritional supplementation program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). This isn’t Advantia’s first deal with a public health department — it is currently working with Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, Nevada, Washington DC and the city of Dallas. 

“Our goal is to provide nutrition and breastfeeding services and information that empower individuals and keep West Virginia families healthy,” Dr. Catherine Slemp, state health officer and commissioner of DHHR’s Bureau for Public Health, said in a statement. “Currently, West Virginia WIC serves nearly 35,000 mothers and young children monthly. With the Pacify app, we can now offer around-the-clock live support to help WIC moms breastfeed.”

Buoy Health, a health-focused chatbot that helps people interpret their symptoms and suggests what level of care they should seek, has joined forces with Boston Children’s Hospital to augment the latter’s HealthMap digital epidemiology tool. As part of this collaboration, HealthMap can give Buoy an idea of what is happening on the broader coronavirus disease landscape, while Buoy users can also receive information on the new disease.

“Because we have a good sense of underlying risk we can push that information to Buoy, and that can help them fine tune their algorithm and fine tune their decision support tools,” Boston Children’s Hospital CIO John Brownstein told MobiHealthNews. “But the reverse is also true — they are collecting symptom data from consumers that can point to signals for disease contamination.”