My latest posts, articles & citations.
Since Jasmine Nguyen collapsed nine years ago, apparently from a seizure, the 32-year-old has lived in a nursing home in Lodi, Calif., dependent on a ventilator to breathe and the facility's staff for her daily needs.
But since early this year, the nursing home has been seeking to evict Ms. Nguyen and a dozen other residents in similar situations, potentially replacing them with shorter-term residents likely to bring more revenue.
At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.
In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.
After 17 babies got overdoses of the blood thinner heparin at a Texas hospital, a hospital-quality group pointed to the incident as one more reason to push for computerized systems for ordering drugs within hospitals.
When you’re navigating around something as delicate as the brain — not to mention cutting things out of it — depth perception helps a lot.
That’s part of the reason so much brain-surgery is still done the old-fashioned way: by cutting open the skull. Endoscopes are great for many types of minimally invasive surgery, but the kind that give a 3-D view are generally too bulky for brain surgery That’s beginning to change.
For decades, hospital nurseries have taken great care to keep babies warm. You can hardly move in the average maternity ward without tripping over incubators, warming bassinets and receiving blankets. Now, though, some hospitals are turning the thermostat down for a few infants.
Small and rural hospitals can have a tough time keeping patients. Many will drive an hour or two to the nearest city for all but the most basic — or most urgent — care. And the sickest patients may have to be shipped out anyway, to reach the specialists that might save them.
What if high-tech tools could bring the big-city expertise to their patients instead?
Roadside bombs have made brain damage a grim hallmark of modern war. A RAND study out today says 320,000 U.S. troops may have suffered brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan — and less than half say they were ever evaluated by a doctor.
Even where there’s no unconsciousness or visible head wound, mild brain damage, without prompt treatment, can cause lasting problems.
Small businesses are leading the national retreat from employer-based health coverage.
More than half of the 6 million Americans who lost health insurance between 2000 and 2006 worked at small companies or were self-employed, a recent Health Affairs online article reported.
Plenty of companies are working on better engines to search the Web for health information. Now insurance heavyweight Aetna is making it personal.
The company is rolling out a search service that takes into account a member’s personal health information, including past diagnoses and health-plan details.
Dodged the flu this year? A lot of people have, and some companies aren’t too happy about it.
The CDC’s FluView map shows that this year’s influenza season has been a slow-starter. While the flu has picked up in recent weeks, sporadic reports of flu were the most common on the agency’s flu map during in December.
