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The operating room is getting smarter, more effective—and a lot less risky for patients. Hospitals are investing in new devices, designs and digital technologies that promise a new era of innovation for surgery. The moves are part of a growing shift away from traditional open procedures that involve big incisions, lots of blood loss and long hospitalizations. They point toward a future where more patients can choose minimally invasive outpatient surgeries, with faster recoveries, fewer complications, and less pain and scarring. (Landro, 5/28)

Brain surgery is never going to be easy. When a surgeon is removing a tumor, even a slight miscalculation in the angle of entry can interfere with important functions of the brain. But augmented reality—blending digital imagery with the physical world—may help surgeons keep their focus at critical moments during the task. (Toy, 5/28)

Technology promises to make it easier for people with dementia to live independently for longer and stay connected with family and friends. Home sensors, communications and personal navigational devices—some of which are already commercially available—provide ways to monitor patients and loved ones from afar. Robotics, smartphone apps and some intriguing experiments with tablet computers, meanwhile, show the potential to help sufferers of dementia sustain their social and family contacts. (Wang, 5/28)

Telemedicine has grown rapidly in recent years. Now hundreds of schools are bringing it to the nurse’s office. School nurses say telemedicine helps them treat students faster right at school, reducing risk of infection, getting the students back to class faster and relieving a big burden on the students’ families. (Holland, 5/25)

Patients sitting in emergency rooms, at chiropractors' offices and at pain clinics in the Philadelphia area may start noticing on their phones the kind of messages typically seen along highway billboards and public transit: personal injury law firms looking for business by casting mobile online ads at patients. The potentially creepy part? They're only getting fed the ad because somebody knows they are in an emergency room. (Allyn, 5/25)

Since losing his vision at age 13, Erik Weihenmayer has summited Mount Everest, white-water rafted and climbed frozen waterfalls. But making soup in his kitchen presented a unique challenge. On a frozen waterfall he could tap his ax against the ice to get a feel for its density, but in the kitchen, he had no way to differentiate between cans of tomato and chicken noodle. Mr. Weihenmayer, 49 years old, found a solution in Microsoft Corp.’s Seeing AI, a free app for the visually impaired. Among other things, the app can recognize faces, identify money, read handwriting and scan bar codes to differentiate between cans of soup. (Kornelis, 5/28)

Kaiser Permanente, based in Oakland, Calif., closely manages the medical care of people enrolled in its health-insurance plan, who use Kaiser’s integrated network of hospitals and doctors. Increasingly, that network is also a digital one. (Evans, 5/28)