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MarketWatch’s Stacey Delo has a preview of what will figure into the business and financial headlines in the coming week.

See the original post here: Outlook: The Week Ahead in U.S. News/a>

With an apparent eye on Pfizer’s experience early this month, Merck officials made one thing abundantly clear during the morning’s earnings report: “Nothing in our guidance has changed,” CFO Peter Kellogg said on a conference call with analysts.

The cuts keep coming from U.K. pharma. Just a few days after AstraZeneca said it would eliminate thousands of jobs, the London papers reported this weekend that GlaxoSmithKline is about to announce some big cuts of its own.

The Times of London said Glaxo will cut “up to 4,000″ jobs; the Financial Times put the figure at “more than 3,000.”

The latest sign of the health-tech convergence: Walt Mossberg, the WSJ’s personal tech guru who writes about smart phones and operating systems, is reviewing a blood-glucose meter.

Pfizer’s deal today with Israeli biotech Protalix BioTherapeutics to license most of the rights for a promising therapy for a rare disease caught our eye for a number of reasons:

Yes, health IT systems done right can help improve patient safety. But health IT systems done wrong can actually create new safety risks, a doctor and patient-safety expert says in a new article published by the journal Health Affairs.

We heard something similar a few weeks back, when we chatted with a senior Kaiser doc who warned of “magical thinking” on health IT. Today’s commentary comes from Bob Wachter, a UC San Francisco hospitalist, who writes:

Stryker, a big medical device company, said today that it’s spending $525 million to buy a company called Ascent Healthcare Solutions that helps hospitals recycle medical devices designed for a single use.

The Health Blog just got an email from Pfizer informing us that some people feel guilty or sad about leaving their dogs behind when they travel for the holidays.

And a vet who works for Pfizer said that if you’re “experiencing tough economic times,” the “unconditional love from your family dog can go a long way toward helping your family manage that extra stress.”

It looks like the FDA could ban drinks that combine alcohol and caffeine. If that happens, it’ll be the continuation of a couple trends: The agency’s recent scrutiny of food companies, and a push by some activists and state officials against alcoholic energy drinks.

IMS Health is nearing a deal to sell itself for nearly $4 billion, the WSJ reports. That raises a simple question: What does IMS Health do, anyway?

Drug companies pay IMS for information about the prescribing habits of individual doctors. This, of course, is very valuable stuff for the drug company sales reps who make calls at doctors’ offices. IMS buys the raw prescription data — which doesn’t identify patients — from pharmacies.