The residents at Christopher Heights of Marlborough Assisted Living love to give back to their community, especially when it involves helping children, and their most recent volunteer project helped them do just that.

Robert Ryan has a career, a girlfriend, and a motorcycle -- things that seem normal to the average person, but are the product of years of recovery for the former addict.

He didn't have a high school diploma or a license and felt hopeless and without guidance. "Through my life of using drugs and alcohol I found myself at the age of 20 in all sorts of legal situations and really having no idea what I was going to do," Ryan, 25, said. "At that point in life I really had no idea recovery was possible."

Brittany Schaefer reports- UMass Memorial Medical Center is the first hospital in the nation with new bone imaging technology.

UMass Medical School researchers are testing wearable — and swallowable — devices they say could help doctors learn more about how opioid addiction happens and how they can better prescribe the dangerous drugs.

The electronic monitoring devices track how patients take the drugs and how their bodies react.

UMass Memorial Health Care is teaming up with PatientPing, a Boston-based national care coordination network that connects healthcare providers with real-time clinical event notifications on a data-sharing initiative in Massachusetts.  The goal of the partnership is to foster higher quality care through better patient care coordination in a state whose efforts thus far have been challenged by competitive barriers. 

Doctor Michael Hirsh knows the damage bullets can inflict on a child’s body. During his 30-year career as a pediatric surgeon in hospitals in the Northeast, he has treated scores of young patients with gunshot wounds, ranging from children accidentally shot by their siblings to teenagers determined to take their own lives.

Heywood Hospital and UMass Memorial Medical Center have received nearly $1 million in combined funds as part of a telemedicine pilot being conducted by the state.

The announcement of the funding was made Wednesday by the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission (HPC) as part of $11.3 million in health care investments. The funding for Heywood (capped at $499,860) and UMass Medical (capped at $496,184) is designed to extend behavioral health services in populations such as children or those with substance use disorders.

UMass Memorial Medical Center has received a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts distinction for its spinal surgeries.

UMass Memorial Medical Center has purchased a robotic surgical assistant that will help neurosurgeons with complex procedures.

UMass Memorial purchased the robotized surgical assistant, as it is called, from French surgical assistant robot developer MEDTECH for an undisclosed amount during the manufacturer's fourth fiscal quarter 2016. It was one of seven robots sold in the United States, according to MEDTECH, and it is one of the few robotic surgical assistants being used by an academic medical center in the U.S., according to UMass Memorial.