Hospital Ratings..

Something that we don’t think about often is if someone we know gets hurt, which hospital should you go to if you can choose?  Today we have a guest Blogger, Pamela who works for the only hospital in St.Louis to make the top 100 hospitals in the nation.   She did a great write-up after a recent incident:

Hey folks recent events have lead me to investigate some of the stats that we are always talking about at my work.  Thought you guys might like some links for data so don’t take my word or your docs or anyone,  look into your healthcare and make informed decisions about it. 

The National rating company report for hospitals for certain indications is based on ten years of patient data and outcomes based, in other words how likely you are to live at these facilities: http://www.healthgrades.com/consumer/index.cfm?fuseaction=mod&modtype=hospitals&modact=search_wizard&subact=proc&prodtype=hosprat&state=MO

and then you can search for a specific issue, like for example heart failure: http://www.healthgrades.com/consumer/index.cfm?fuseaction=mod&modtype=hospitals&modact=hospitals_search_results&prodtype=hosprat&state=MO&city=&maparea=334&proc=CHF&tabset=current&hgid=&useragree=yes

According to the Centers for Disease Control, more people die from hospital infections than from homicides, AIDS and car accidents combined.  Did your healthcare worker wear gloves and wash their hands when they were done with you?  They probably did not with the last guy either..

Hospital acquired infections report based on your hospital: http://www.dhss.mo.gov/HAI/

Here is an interesting little article on HAI  http://www.ksdk.com/printfullstory.aspx?storyid=111962 

To look up accreditation on hospitals, there is the JCAHO website – the Joint Commission Accreditation on Hospital Organization which includes reporting of core measure indicators (safety factors)http://www.qualitycheck.org/consumer/searchQCR.aspx

The bottom line is does your hospital report what it does and how well it does it, if not what are they hiding? 

 

Technorati tags: Hospital, ratingings, live, HAI, Hospital acquired infections, guest, health

Fun Activities for the Kids for Summer..

School is ending for most kids, to ease with the transition and to help keep them entertained, here are 101 activities.. http://lifelearningtoday.com/2007/05/20/78-parent-child-activities-free-download/

New options for areas with poor cell phone coverage..

Coming soon to a house near you..  Where I work cell phone coverage is non-existent, as is the case for most carriers.  The company is spending a lot of money to put in a repeater for most carries, as this is the only option short of the cell carriers building new towers.  It’s expensive, slow (6 months now and still waiting.) and expensive.  Soon there will be a $200 option.. the Femtocell. check it out -> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070523-femtocells-bring-3g-cellular-signals-indoors-and-underground.html

Remote Desktop Connection RDP 6.0 update – Not until When??!

The new RDP version won’t be getting an update until sp1 for Vista!  What a load of crap that the team is taking that long to address some serious issues.  Once it’s released I’ll let everyone know, if you don’t hear it first from another source. 

One feature it’s always missed is the re-connect after reboot: basically a way to tell the interface try pinging the box I’m connected to every 5-10 seconds, and once it’s accepting RDP again, go ahead and reconnect.  Another twist to this would be a simple ‘ping it’ box that would open a second window with a ping -t (which pings until you close the window.)  It’s a step I do frequently; having it built-in would be a major bonus.  Perhaps version 12 will have this feature?  We’ll see.   If you like the idea, send a link to this blog on their blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/archive/2007/04/26/update-remote-desktop-connection-terminal-services-client-6-0-for-windows-server-2003-sp2-released.aspx

Top 10 Poisonous Plants

A list of plants you may have around the house to keep away from kids and pets.. http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/top10_poisonous_plants-1.html

Missouri fault line..

I’ve always wondered why the middle of a continental plate, as is Missouri, has a fault line with some of the biggest quakes recorded in the US.  New scans show one possibility: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070510-earthquakes.html

An interesting Photography Technique

This gent take photos of objects that are miniatures of real life in a way to place them back where they belong.  See for yourself:

http://i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=23141

Perspective

My young daughter asked me why people across the street looked like they were a few inches tall.  So we talked a bit about what perspective is all about.  Here is a sideshow that should give you perspective about technology and where we are headed.  It’s worth the three minutes to check out..  http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/shift-happens-33834/

Gmail

I’ve been using GMail since early beta, and until recently I didn’t understand how to get the equivalent of a Outlook folder.  A coworker showed me how.  Basically you setup a label (folder name in outlook) and setup a filter and apply this filter to the label.  Combine this with this little tidbit of info, and you have a folder of unread messages.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/05/shortcuts-for-special-gmail-labels.html

Windows Vista Oddities

My Vista system became nearly unresponsive a week ago.  I tried to alt-ctrl-del to bring up task manager to see what what hogging resources, but after several attempts nothing.  About 5 minutes later, I get a pop-up that states ‘Failure – security options, Logon process has failed to create the security options dialogue.”    At least it knew there was a problem. The only way to fix it was the 5-second power button hold.  Alas, XP was more stable for me..

Update: I have not gotten this error message again. It seems the shell has to be in pretty bad shape to present this error. I was taxing the system pretty hard at the time, and getting a better video card has seemed to fix most of these types of errors

Great place to learn how to fly..

Host File updates.

A while ago, a team put together a simple solution for fighting adware and other malicious websites.  It’s simply a replacement for your hosts. file.  The host file is a file that you pc looks at first when it attempts to resolve a website address to an ip address.  The hosts file has a list of all the bad things on the Internet, and it sets the address to be 127.0.0.1, which is always your computer.  The bottom line is it stops your computer from each communicating with any of these bad sites.  It requires you to monthly go back to the site and update the file again, as sites change etc.  This is not for the faint at heart, so only do this if you feel comfortable with going back and deleting the file if you run into problems.

check it out here:

Source: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm