FIVE YEARS AFTER THE INSTITUTE of Medicine (IOM) reported that as many as 98 000 people die annually as the result of medical errors and called for a national effort to make health care safe, it is time to assess our progress. Is health care safer now? And, if not, why not? The IOM’s report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, galvanized a dramatically expanded level of conversatio...

A lot. Since inception of Contender, a machine learning method tailored for computerassisted decision making in industrial spoken dialog systems, it was rolled out in over 200 instances throughout our applications processing nearly 40 million calls. The net effect of this data-driven method is a significantly increased system performance gaining about 100,000 additional automated calls every mo...

A lot of confusion and misunderstanding has been created by several commentators on the issue of non-performing loans (NPLs) of banking system. They take the absolute amount of such loans at the current point of time and compare it with the quantum of such loans in October 1999 and make a hue and cry that the situation has deteriorated because the quantum of NPLs has gone up. Such a simplistic ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the knowledge of four groups of individuals regarding who is legally authorised to consent to health care or research involving older patients. DESIGN A provincewide postal survey. SETTING Province of Quebec, Canada. PARTICIPANTS Three hundred older adults, 434 informal caregivers of cognitively impaired individuals, 98 researchers in aging and 136 members of research ...

Despite huge global burden, stroke disease has traditionally received little attention in the general medical press. We review a series of four acute stroke research articles published in a themed issue of the Lancet. Claiborne-Johnston and coworkers presented a scoring system to stratify risk of stroke following transient ischaemic attack. Chalela and colleagues demonstrated that magnetic reso...