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.
Current projects
- The Wall Street Journal (work)
- Exact Change Only (photo/travel blog)
Past projects
- Planet Money (freelance)
- Disclosure Matters (start-up)
- Quartz (contributing)
- UMd College of Journalism (teaching)
- footnoted (freelance)
- YCharts (freelance)
- DealBook (freelance)
- BusinessWeek (work)
On Twitter
You are here
TheoWire
My latest posts, articles & citations.
WSJ Health Blog |
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
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.
WSJ Health Blog |
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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.
WSJ Health Blog |
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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?
WSJ Health Blog |
Thursday, April 17, 2008
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.
WSJ Health Blog |
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
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.
WSJ Health Blog |
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
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.
WSJ Health Blog |
Friday, February 8, 2008
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.
The Wall Street Journal |
Friday, October 19, 2007
What do the ACLU, Gun Owners of America, the Free Congress Foundation and Microsoft have in common? A hankering for patient privacy, it seems.
With some 40 other groups, they sent congressmen a letteryesterday urging them to “establish basic privacy protections” for health records, and soon. (Or see the press release.)
WSJ Health Blog |
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Medical records stored on computers instead of paper are touted as the modern way to cut health costs while improving quality. But the validity of the proposition is called into question by a study appearing in the current issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
Pages
Feed me! (RSS)