News From Around the Web
> GE Healthcare engineers, along with their colleagues with GE Oil & Gas, are reconfiguring GE's medical X-ray detectors to enable them to be used in deep-sea immersible rigs to X-ray pipelines. The hope is that the technology will be used to provide data about all deep-sea pipelines in order to check for corrosion and cracks before they lead to small or even catastrophic spill. Article
> Researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging on jazz musicians have found that while they play spontaneous, improvisational music, their brains showed activity in areas usually associated with spoken language and syntax. "Until now, studies of how the brain processes auditory communication between two individuals have been done only in the context of spoken language," said Charles Limb, an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the senior author of a report that was published in PLOS ONE. "But looking at jazz lets us investigate the neurological basis of interactive, musical communication as it occurs outside of spoken language." Article
Health Finance News
> New York City's public hospitals face a deficit topping $400 million for the 2015 fiscal year and could easily surpass $1 billion by 2018. The New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., projects a $430 million budget deficit for fiscal 2015. The gap likely will reach $1.4 billion by 2018. Article
Health IT News
> Using patient-flow software resulted in dramatically reduced length-of-stay and significant cost savings for Beaufort (S.C.) Memorial Hospital in a six-week trial. Hospital staff discussed the results last week at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Orlando, Fla. The 197-bed not-for-profit community hospital has 10,000 annual inpatient discharges and 50,000 annual emergency department visits. Article
And Finally... I'm not dead yet. Article