By Lori Houston

More than ever, hospitals are squeezed by demands to reduce costs, operate more efficiently, improve patient safety and outcomes, reduce readmissions, and earn high patient satisfaction ratings. We’ve entered an era where accountable care and pay for performance increasingly dictate hospital revenues.

While technology alone can’t enable hospitals to meet their challenges, there’s a burst of innovation around health tech tools that offer hospitals new pathways to harnessing data, managing performance, and providing better care all around.

What better opportunity for hospital CIOs and CTOs to get a close look at emerging possibilities than the upcoming Health 2.0 2013 Fall Conference?

Here’s a sampling of five budding technologies with game-changing potential for hospitals.

Health Recovery Solutions’ has developed a care management system that scores discharged hospital patients on their re-admission risk daily and intervenes when necessary. The tools are built around a software platform on tablets that patients take home, enabling interaction with trained health coaches and nurses who can intervene when needed.

Catch a demo as part of Health 2.0’s Improving the Inpatient Experience: Tools for Hospitals, a breakout session demonstrating new and dynamic ways to break the structural cycles underlying readmissions.

The SmartPatient Experience is a mobile app for post-hospital patient discharge surveys aimed at improving patient satisfaction. Natural language processing and machine learning coupled with deep analytics reveal meaningful, actionable insights from patients to raise healthcare quality and manage population health. Created by a patient based on his personal health journey, the tool debuts during Health 2.0 Launch!

In the patient safety arena, Qualaris Healthcare Solutions competes as one of four enterprise finalists in Health 2.0’s DC to VC: Health IT Startup Showcase, pitching a web and mobile-based software service to help hospitals reduce hospital acquired conditions such as infections and falls. Qualaris enables hospitals to measure their own best practices compliance, packaging this with enterprise safety compliance data analysis and communications tools. Best of all: no in-house IT staff time required.

On the hospital operations front, AnalyticsMD has developed a web-based software service that provides data-driven operational insights to support front-line hospital managers with patient flow, staffing, bed capacity, and overall performance management. See the demo along with four other essential products designed and developed to keep hospitals running smoothly in Management Tools for Hospitals.

box markets a cloud-based, multi-device, secure content management and file sharing system for enterprise IT needs. drchrono developed one of the first mobile electronic health record systems built for tablets. Now these two entrepreneurial players have joined forced on a new product they will demo at Big Data: Tools and Applications for Transforming Care, a session surveying how hospitals and health organizations can integrate big data to improve clinical workflow and performance.

Bonus: Yes, we said five new technologies but if you’re coming to Health 2.0 as a hospital exec or IT staff member, we think you’ll want to know about the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Hospital Price Transparency Challenge. Competing teams used recently released CMS hospital price data to build visualizations and apps to help consumers make better decisions.  To see the winning app, you have to be there.