Paul Bennett

Handheld ultrasound devices could eventually become as common as stethoscopes, and might even be used by patients themselves to send images to doctors from home.

Clinical trials continue to evolve as new technologies allow researchers to manage them without participants coming to a physical location. Despite hurdles, remote trials are likely to become standard practice.

From directing patients to proper treatments to synthesizing research studies to helping doctors diagnose and cure various diseases, artificial intelligence is set to transform healthcare.

Telemedicine has the promise to improve the customer experience of care and the health of populations, reduce the per capital cost of health care, and improve the experience of providing it. But individual patients will ultimately decide whether the growing benefits of telemedicine outweigh its potential downsides.

The new shift incentivizes doctors to focus on preventative health care—keeping patients healthy, so they only visit clinics when necessary. And the shift is changing how doctors work.

Allurion’s rethink of existing “weight-loss balloons” could put a dent in obesity. Who knew that a sack of water in your tummy could be high tech? You just swallow it and they fill it up. Previous methods were less palatable.

HealthTap gives patient/consumers access to doctors through video, voice, and text chat on any connected device. It also provides a platform for a community of physicians to share knowledge among themselves. The age of digital healthcare is coming quickly, and bringing doctors and patients together online is a critical step.

Boston and Barcelona, Spain have something in common with Yelp and Zillow–they’re taking advantage of open data. Along with all the ways it’s reshaping business, opening up data to the use of outsiders is beginning also to reshape how city, state, and federal agencies work. Socrata, a privately-held government-data platform provider based in Seattle, is making a business out of facilitating this trend.

Tech is helping drive exciting changes in healthcare, though they don’t galvanize public attention like driverless cars or virtual reality headsets. But as the industry embraces digital strategies, American patients may begin to see a patient-centric model that will streamline the system and upend the way medical professionals operate.

Entrepreneur Mitch Rothschild says he has always followed a simple philosophy: Determine where a gap exists and launch a business to fill it. He thought information was seriously lacking in healthcare, for both patients and service providers. So he founded Vitals in 2007 to offer a suite of information and analytics tools to help consumers, providers, and health plans better track healthcare prices and quality. Today he serves as the company's executive chairman. Each month, some of Vitals' 10 million users perform 250,000 searches at Vitals.com, seeking information about the U.S. healthcare system, where they can browse 5 million user reviews of about 890,000 medical practitioners. In simple terms, Vitals hopes to be a Priceline of sorts for an industry in which costs can be opaque and consumers often feel powerless.

Medical professionals are increasingly embracing mobile apps. They enable patients to track and share their metrics with doctors, and let caregivers monitor treatments and guide patients following surgery or other procedures. Now an app released earlier this year targets the core function of doctors—helping them diagnose and treat diseases.

Consumer healthcare apps linked to smartphones or wearable devices are growing in popularity, and forthcoming offerings from Apple and Google are likely to draw more attention to the field. These systems allow users to monitor a range of information—heart rate, calories burned, distance walked—but they don’t guarantee a change in behavior, much less an improvement in health.

With the holiday season behind us, you might be among the many Americans looking at their checking and credit card statements wondering just where their money went in December, or possibly even all of 2013. If so, 2014 may be when new apps help you get control of your finances. Several simple new tools leverage social media and mobile technologies to help manage your money and spending. Moven, Simple, and GoBank give users who have FDIC-insured, bank-backed debit cards links to mobile apps that provide services including expense categorization and spending alerts, as well as tools for budgeting, saving, and transfering money.

Back in the 1970s, before a personal computer was on every desk or lap and a smartphone in every pocket, blind people read printed material—books, newspapers, bills—with reading machines. Harvey Lauer at the Blind Rehabilitation Center in Hines, Ill., was a pioneer in developing reading machines for the blind, and my father, Richard Bennett, a researcher at the Veterans Administration in Palo Alto, was one of his colleagues. “Blindness,” Lauer once said, “is something more than a nuisance, but a lot less than a major catastrophe.” The phrase aptly sums up the challenge of reading for blind people: It takes effort, but it’s not an insurmountable problem.

A new book website aims to provide a counterweight to Amazon’s growing dominance in books, by focusing on recommendations—the linking, liking, and embedding experience that drives so much online culture these days. Bookish.com launched in February, backed by three major publishers: Hachette Book Group, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster. Given its genesis as the brainchild of industry giants, it's a little bit like Hulu for books—an effort to regain some control in an era of content gone wild.