shake that cat

Where, exactly, is that cat spending the rest of his time?

On July 26, the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog published "Final Exit, Pursued by a Cat," reporting on a short article in the New England Journal of Medicine:

So there’s this cat that lives in a nursing home in Providence, R.I., and somehow he knows when people are about to die. At the end of the line, Oscar jumps on people’s beds and purrs really loud.

So when the staff at the nursing home see Oscar get into bed with somebody, they check the person’s chart and make the call to family members. Things don’t look so good. You might want to come down here.

A day earlier, the same blog posted "Lab Values Predict Mortality for Hospitalized Patients":

Measuring just how well hospitals care for patients has proved tricky. Mortality measures, adjusted for risk, are one approach.

So what’s the best way to evaluate how likely hospitalized patients are to die? Lab tests, according to a paper in the current issue of the journal Medical Health.

I think it's pretty obvious what's going on: that cat is crunching the lab test data.