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.

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.

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.

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 2008 R2, but there’s not way of getting it to boot in Hyper-V (i tried a myriad of ways, including several Linux tools that can convert GPT disks to MBR-style disks, got the Windows Boot Manager installed, but it still wouldn’t boot).

So. What now? I’m out of reasonable ideas. I have opened a Microsoft support case regarding the SCVMM 2008 R2 P2V crash on an EFI machine, but i’m not sure i’ll get a quick out of this. If anyone has any ideas on how to get this fixed, i’d be thankful for any replies.

If i ever get a solution that does not include reinstalling everything from scratch, i’ll of course post it.

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.

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.

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.

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.