Posts In Category Uncategorized
Fall speaking engagements
on September 3, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (0)
My fledgling speaking career—one that seems to be finding me rather than me pursuing it—is getting a big boost this fall.
Next week, I’m part of the opening keynote session at the mHealth Initiative’s 2nd International mHealth Networking Conference in San Diego.
On Thursday, Sept. 16, it looks like I will be moderating a roundtable on mobile patient management at the half-day Mobile Healthcare and Medicine Symposia in Toronto, as part of Mobile Innovation Week in that fantastic Canadian city.
I’ll be headed to Las Vegas in mid-October to moderate three sessions at the Mobile Health Expo 2010:
- “The Real Time Healthcare Enterprise,” Oct. 19, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. PDT
- “Carrier or Wired Connectivity as the Backhaul From a Central Aggregator? Wireless Architectures and Industry Alignments for Approaches to Establishing Successful, Interactive Healthcare Monitoring,” Oct. 21, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
- “Mobile Payments and Health Information Exchange at the Point of Care Using Multi-Modal Mobile Apps to Engage Patients for Healthcare Providers,” Oct. 21, 1:30 – 2:30 p.m.
Also, FierceMobileHealthcare is planning some kind of event around the mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C., Nov. 8-10. As editor of that publication, I expect to play a role in the event, which will be separate from the actual conference that the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is putting on. Stay tuned for details.
I hope to see you at one or more of these events.
I’ve also, finally, updated the list of upcoming health IT-related conferences that you see in the right-hand column of this page. This should take you all the way through HIMSS next February.
Oh, if you were wondering what I think of the term “mHealth” (with a forced capital H), read my column in this week’s FierceMobileHealthcare.
Early edition
on August 19, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (0)
Regular readers of my work for FierceMarkets know that the newsletters usually hit your inboxes in the early to mid-afternoon. Today, many of you will get FierceEMR early as part of a little experiment to see when people open the newsletter and click through to stories.
It’s 9:35 a.m. here in Chicago and 10:35 a.m. at Fierce headquarters in Washington, and today’s issue is done. I’m exhausted from a late night and an early morning trying to meet the early deadline. All the stories are up on the FierceEMR site already, awaiting your perusal. Check them out, while I go get another cuppa–and ponder going back to bed.
This will be the last you’ll read of mine from Fierce until Monday, Aug. 30, as I’m taking a week off. Not a vacation, mind you, but a week off just to catch up on things like sleep, housework and sanity, and hopefully start on a long-delayed home improvement project. I can’t guarantee I’ll blog next week, either, but then again, I haven’t exactly been on a regular schedule here in a while. Paying gigs come first. 
Another health IT reality check, this time with a patient portal
on August 12, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (0)
Remember about 16 months ago when I shared the experience of my own internist’s practice struggling to adopt an EMR?
I went back to the doctor this week for a routine checkup and found that some progress had been made. For one thing, my own doctor charted the encounter electronically. And, much to my pleasant surprise, the practice had started up a patient portal. I discuss my experience with the portal in FierceEMR today.
As a side note, a practice manager from, of all places, Guam, recently contacted me about the original blog post, wanting for me to get him in touch with the practice I wrote about because he was considering the same Sage Intergy system. I was happy to oblige, as was the office manager of my physicians’ practice.
UEFI continues to haunt me
on July 6, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (0)
We have an IBM x3650 M2, that runs a specific business application, using Windows Server 2008 R2 installed in EFI mode. Now, requirements have changed and we need to virtualize this. Unfortunately, SCVMM 2008 R2′s P2V crashes when run on this machine. disk2vhd can produce a proper VHD from an EFI/UEFI install of Windows Server [...]
RIP John Glass of CHIK Services
on July 5, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (0)
I’ve just learned that John Glass, a founding director of Australian health IT publishing and consulting firm CHIK Services, died last Tuesday as a result of complications from acute leukemia.
According to the company: “He will be greatly remembered for his larger than life persona and tenacious pursuit in bridging the divide between the health and information and communication technology sectors as one of the founding Directors of CHIK Services.
“His interest in furthering the e-health agenda never waned – he was still sending through articles and ideas from his hospital bed little more than a week ago – and he will be enormously missed by all those at CHIK and involved e-health generally.”
I’d like to take this opportunity to extend my condolences to John’s widow, Sally, and the rest of the Chik crew. They are well known even in the U.S. health IT community, as they have made the long trek to America for the annual HIMSS conference for as long as I can remember.
Health Wonk Review, summer research edition
on June 29, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (0)
I haven’t blogged a lot lately because the real work tends to get in the way. There’s only so long I can spend in front of the computer each day before I start to get a little antsy. OK, a lot antsy.
Fortunately, others are more focused on their blogs than I am, and that brings me to the latest iteration of Health Wonk Review, hosted by Brad Wright at the Health Policy Analysis blog. With summer here, this is the last edition of HWR until July 22, because, let’s face it, everybody needs a break from time to time.
Wright focuses quite a bit on research, but does link to one IT post and another about the patient-centered medical home. He also includes some editorial cartoons culled from around the Web, notably this one from Orlando Sentinel cartoonist Dana Summers. The elephant in the room re: health reform is tort reform, Summers suggests. Yeah, we haven’t addressed the liability problem yet, but the fee-for-service payment system is, in my humble opinion, the greatest culprit. There’s that little matter of poor quality, too.
A better term than PHR?
on June 15, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (2)
I’ve occasionally explored some of the nomenclature in health IT, particularly how the term “personal health record” is something distinct from “electronic health record” and how some news reports confuse the two. I’ve been known to laugh at the use of “personal electronic health record,” which I think was an uninformed reporter’s way of saying that each person should have an EHR.
Over the weekend, I saw a distinct term from, I believe, Australia: “patient-controlled health record.” That makes a lot more sense to me and tells me the purpose of the record. A Google search on that term actually turned up a Harvard Medical School meeting on “personally controlled health record infrastructure” target”= new” that took place in 2006 and 2007. But the term seems to have disappeared from the U.S. radar.
New FierceHealthcare mobile app
on June 11, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (0)
My current No. 1 client, FierceMarkets, has just released a FierceHealthcare mobile app for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile. Download the app at http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/mobile or text “Fierce” to 46275.
You want solutions for consumer ignorance about health IT? OK
on June 9, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (0)
Monday in FierceHealthIT, I wrote a commentary about a new study from the California HealthCare Foundation that found that consumers still equate more care with better care. The study, published in Health Affairs, concluded that evidence-based medicine is a foreign concept among the general public.
In my commentary, I derided the whole premise of the report. I mean, many people in healthcare aren’t completely clear about what evidence-based medicine is. I also criticized mass media for not doing a good job educating the public about quality of care, particularly in the sham of a debate over health reform in the last year or so. It’s not the first time I’ve said something to this effect.
Within three hours of my commentary being posted, one anonymous coward posted the following comment on the FierceHealthIT page: “So Neil, instead of the snark, how about some solutions? You’re a journalist – isn’t the public’s ignorance your failing?”
Well, Mr. or Ms. Coward, no, the public’s ignorance is not my failing. If I had had access to mainstream news outlets, I would have asked the tough questions of the politicians, policymakers and lobbyists, not fueled the red herring of a debate over whether healthcare reform was about government control or not. It’s quality, stupid. I continue to try to pitch mainstream media about freelance gigs, but, alas, everyone’s either cut their freelance budgets to the bone or they won’t give the time of day to someone they don’t know or who doesn’t have some kind of insider connection.
And, to Coward’s other point, I have offered some solutions. If you weren’t so knee-jerk in your anonymous condemnation of my snark, you would know that I recently wrote a piece for journalists about covering EHRs and related health IT topics.
It’s over on the site of the Reporting on Health project at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.
While you’re at it, you might want to check some of my other Fierce columns about how people both in the media and the health IT industry need to do a better job of communicating the issues. They’re not hard to find. In fact, here’s one to get you started.
Next time, don’t be such a coward. And an uninformed one at that.
New article on wireless healthcare
on June 1, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized, Comments (1)
I’ve had a second article published on Medscape’s Business of Medicine site. This time, it’s an overview of a topic I’ve become quite familiar with in the past year and a half: wireless healthcare. Check it out here. (Free registration required.)
