Living Large in Las Vegas or David and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?

When Vince Kuraitis from Better Health Technologies asked me to co-present with him at the Disease Management Leadership Forum in Las Vegas it sounded like a good idea. I'd speak about Health 2.0 in the context of disease management, couple the trip with some client meetings to defray the expense, and get together with a bunch of colleagues and prospects.It didn't quite work out that way but it hasn't been a total loss either.So what went wrong?

• Most of my meetings fell through. One client resigned from his company days ago, another ran out of budget, a third and fourth decided to skip the meeting entirely
• I wanted to do a live demo of various Health 2.0 sites such as Patients Like Me, Daily Strength, MedHelp, Healia and MedTripInfo but I learned from the conference hosts that there'd be no Internet access in the room. Not only that, but some of the screenshots I took as a backup measure wouldn't display at all!
• The hotel (Caesars Palace) has a gym but they wanted to charge me $25 to use the fitness room!
• It's a long way back and forth from Boston. It was a long wait for my cab and to check in when I arrived late last night (after watching the Red Sox lose). I'm not looking forward to the red-eye tonight

But there have been a number of positive things, too

• The hotel gave me a giant suite --about 1500 square feet with three bathrooms
• I met some interesting people including my co-presenter Randy Williams from Pharos Innovations
• I had a good interview with Dr. Henry DePhilips from MEDecision, which I will post soon
• I haven't lost any money at the casino

There's still a cocktail reception coming up. So who knows, it could turn into something positive in the end. As they say at Caesars, "Have a lucky day!"