Hospitals Share

What is it with different hospitals sharing the same name? Beth Israel and Beth Israel Deaconess is confusing enough, but I can't make heads or tails of Mount Sinai Medical Center and Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Both are large metropolitan hospitals with affiliated medical schools. Both have the same name. One is in New York, one is in Miami. They are apparently unaffiliated and try to pretend the other doesn't exist. Mount Sinai NY has 1,171 beds and 2,181 attending physicians. Mount Sinai Miami has 955 beds and more than 700 physicians.

P.S. There's also one in Toronto. 472 bed Mount Sinai Hospital.

Trounson handed $3B, told to build stem-cell therapies

Alan Trounson’s job is to figure out how to spend $3 billion.
Doesn’t sound that tough on its face, but there’s a pretty
big catch: He’s supposed to give the money to people who can find
stem-cell-based medical therapies within a decade.

Trounson, a researcher who was a pioneer of in-vitro fertilization, runs the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the shop set up after the state’s voters approved raising $3 billion in bonds to fund stem cell research. He’s profiled in today’s WSJ. from WSJ Health Blog

Google May Start Venture Fund

Btw, Sergey Brin's wife is a former partner at health investment fund Catalytic Health. from NYTimes DealBook

Social Networking for Scientists

Typically, scientists have stacks of papers, protocols, and notes in their offices that they pass around as PDFs. Labmeeting is designed first and foremost as a document management site that allows scientists and students to easily upload all of those PDFs, organize them, search them, and share them. Scientsist can create groups, and invite other members of their labs to create a common repository of papers that can be accessed from anywhere. from techcrunch

a similar site is SciLink: With over 104 million relationships mined from literature, SciLink already knows who you're connected to.

Illinois Ponders New Ban on Cell Phones

Have you ever text messaged as you crossed the street? Or checked out your PDA? Or been on your cellphone?

Well, if the Illinois General Assembly bill known as HB 4520 ever gets signed into law, it will be illegal to use a wireless device while crossing the street. from ieee's The Risk Factor

More Patients Failing To Manage Their Medications

"Increasingly, people take their medications at home, away from hospitals and clinics. But most studies of fatal medication errors have focused on those clinical settings. We wanted to know three things: how many of these fatal errors happen at home; how many involve alcohol and/or street drugs; and are these numbers going up?"

For the study, the researchers examined all US death certificates from 1st January 1983 to 31st December 2004 (over 49.5 million), and particularly those citing fatal medication errors (FMEs, nearly 225 thousand).

They classified the deaths into 4 types of FME: domestic or non-domestic, with and without alcohol/street drugs and examined them with respect to the relative importance of alcohol or street drugs and the relative likelihood of professional supervision in the use of the medications.

The four FME types were:

Type 1 = domestic FMEs combined with alcohol and/or street drugs,
Type 2 = domestic FMEs not involving alcohol and/or street drugs,
Type 3 = nondomestic FMEs combined with alcohol and/or street drugs, and
Type 4 = nondomestic FMEs not involving alcohol and/or street drugs.

The results showed that:

• Overall FME death rate went up by 360.5 per cent during the 1983 to 2004 period. from MedicalNewsToday
  

GE Legal

A discussion with company lawyers. from the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel