Identity Resolution Daily

By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President

Much is happening these days in the Data Quality space.  Customers are embracing MDM strategies at a record pace, M&A activity has picked up from an industry perspective, and the various players in the data quality marketplace are expanding their offerings like never before.  It matters little if the objective is to vet fraud or to master data. The race to deliver the dream of an enterprise-wide single-entity-view (SEV) is on.  Gentlemen (and Danica Patrick)… start your engines!

The key word here, naturally, is ‘engines’.  An engine moves things forward, and performs considerably more than one basic task.  As has been well-documented here at IdentityResolutionDaily, a true identity resolution engine plays a vital part of any SEV initiative.  Technologies that can look at data across disparate silos and return results that point to both matches AND non-obvious relationships are in high demand…  and set to grow even further in 2010.  The simplicity of “yes it’s a match” or “no, it’s not a match” is no longer sufficient for most organizations as they seek the single-entity-view.  Remember, an entity is not merely made up of attributes… but also relationships.  A true ‘engine’ points to those relationships, and moves the entire data quality initiative forward.

An engine cares little what the car looks like, and ought to drive a multitude of vehicles.  Similarly, an identity resolution engine ought to be built to solve a multitude of problems.  SEV for exposing risk and fraud, SEV for Healthcare Patient Matching, SEV for Law Enforcement, SEV for customer relationship management, SEV for data disambiguation, SEV for house-holding, and so on and so on.  The engine should perform the same functions… while only the domain (or body type) changes.

It also occurs to us that the engine ought to be flexible in terms of what is mounted to the chassis – and how.  Do you want the 2.2L engine?  4 cylinder or 6 cylinder?  In the case of an identity resolution engine, customers ought to be able to pick how the functionality is delivered.  Full enterprise software license with professional services to build the car?  Done.  Functionality on demand a la Infoglide Software’s Identity Resolution as a Service (IRaaS ^TM) offering?  You got it.  A SEV appliance that sits behind a customer’s firewall to alleviate privacy-in-data concerns?  No problem.

The need for an SEV engine that provides a powerful library of matching and relationship capabilities, delivered in a variety of customer-friendly methods is now more critical than ever.  With the increase in activity lately around the MDM space, one thing is clear:  the race is most definitely on.

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By the Infoglide Team

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Create Table Homo_Sapiens

“Identity Resolution is about the same but  – if a distinction is considered to exist – uses a wider range of data, rules and functionality to relate collected data rows to real world entities. In my eyes exploiting external reference data will add considerable efficiency in the years to come within deduplication / identity resolution.”

OmniMD: Clock starts ticking on meaningful use comments

“The clock starts ticking today on a two-month window in which the public can comment on the Health & Human Service Department’s “meaningful use” proposal, a set of rules outlining how providers can qualify for incentives for using electronic health records.”

Beyond Search: Startling Fact: Size of Cloud Computing Market

“The global cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012, according to IBM based on various market estimates.’

National Underwriter: Fraud Increases In ’09; Bureau Budgets Tighten 

“The Coalition interviewed 37 fraud bureaus during the first three weeks of Oct. 2009 for its survey, titled ‘The Economy and Fraud Fighting on the State Level.’ The bureau directors were asked for their views on trends in 15 areas of fraud, which include staged auto accidents, auto give-ups, padding auto and homeowner claims, arson, and workers’ compensation fraud by both workers and employers.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Healthcare Identity Resolution Confusion

“Confusion about medical records can lead to chaos. We’ve all heard horror stories about hospital tragedies caused by misidentification of a patient, such as applying an unnecessary surgery. It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of correct, unambiguous information in the practice of medicine. Knowing as much as possible about a patient enables a practitioner to reach a correct diagnosis and the proper treatment regimen in the least amount of time.”

NewsandSentinel.com: Local officials do their part to fight terrorism

“Tom Campbell, a consultant on terrorist issues who has worked with Sandy in the past, has been in the field of counter-terrorism for 14 years. We do not profile based on ethnicity and race, what we do is profile behavior,” said Campbell. “Terrorism is evolutionary. Terrorists are always changing their behavior, appearances and tactics. What we try to do to prevent terrorism is focus on the behavior. That’s how we disrupt it before it happens. The emphasis is on prevention.”

intelligent enterprise: Predicting BI Highlights for 2010

“Cloud computing and SaaS will become less niche as both BI heavy weights and vertically-focused vendors recognize that the infrastructure side of BI offers little competitive advantage; instead, it’s the time-to-value and agility. IT owners who don’t want to give up any control are in for a bruising.”

ISRIA: Testimony of Secretary Napolitano before the Senate Committee on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “Intelligence Reform: The Lessons and Implications of the Christmas Day Attack”

“DHS uses TSDB data, managed by the Terrorist Screening Center that is administered by the FBI, to determine who may board, who requires further screening and investigation, who should not be admitted, or who should be referred to appropriate law enforcement personnel. Specifically, to help make these determinations, DHS uses the No-Fly List and the Selectee List, two important subsets within the TSDB. Individuals on the No-Fly List should not receive a boarding pass for a flight to, from, over, or within the United States.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

Confusion about medical records can lead to chaos. We’ve all heard horror stories about hospital tragedies caused by misidentification of a patient, such as applying an unnecessary surgery. It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of correct, unambiguous information in the practice of medicine. Knowing as much as possible about a patient enables a practitioner to reach a correct diagnosis and the proper treatment regimen in the least amount of time.

Underscoring the importance that accurate information plays in effective treatment, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed in 2009 includes incentives for hospitals and doctors to adopt and support certified electronic health record (EHR) technology. In fact, the Act set aside $20 billion to encourage health care organizations to improve their recordkeeping through healthcare information technology.

Today’s hot healthcare industry topic, therefore, is electronic health records. While an EHR can create the potential for interoperability, it can’t deliver interoperability without robust identity resolution. High-quality health care depends on complete, unambiguous patient information being available at all times, so identity resolution technology has become a crucial component of a well-designed healthcare identification infrastructure.

By applying identity resolution to patient identification integrity, identity resolution can prevent common medical errors:
Duplicates are a simple example, where the two records exist for the same person within a single facility. More complex types of errors can easily start to mount up, including overlaps where more than one record exists for one person within two facilities within a single organization, and overlays where information for two people are integrated under a single record.

The rush to respond to ARRA resulted in overstatements of the identity resolution capabilities of many products. For example, most master data management (MDM) systems include matching and de-duplication capabilities that have become labeled “identity resolution” while in fact they lack the critical requirements for identity resolution. Dan Power of Hub Solution Designs has pointed out the growing role of identity resolution in MDM and the need for MDM vendors to move beyond “not invented here” thinking to incorporate true identity resolution into their offerings.

Confusion about medical records can lead to chaos. Clearing up confusion about identity resolution clears a path out of the chaos that will lead to better solutions.

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By the Infoglide Team

hrtools: Workers’ comp anti-fraud and compliance program saved $128 million in FY 2009

“The fight against fraud in the workers’ compensation system brought in $128 million last year, according to a new report from the Washington Department of Labor & Industries (L&I)… L&I also referred 25 fraud cases for criminal prosecution, including 18 workers, four employers, and three health care providers — with a 100 percent success rate.”  [Link to Full Report]

Connecticutplus.com: Governor Rell directs State Homeland Security officials to review summary of NWA 253 failures

“‘Connecticut is home to a state and local ‘fusion center‘ – a place where we share the information with our federal homeland security partners,’ Governor Rell said… Connecticut’s proximity to New York, its number of high-profile locations and its importance as a transportation hub mean that fusion center is a critical – and very busy – place. We want to make sure there are no avoidable breakdowns.’”

FierceEMR: CDC: More than 40 percent of docs have EMRs

“Breaking down the numbers leads to a little more sanity. About 20.5 percent of respondents say they had a basic system capable of recording patient demographics, problem lists, clinical notes, medication orders and of viewing test results. Just 6.3 percent had fully functional EMRs, with medical histories, electronic order entry, drug interaction checking, highlighting of abnormal readings and reminders for guideline-based interventions, the CDC says.”

The Server Room: Cloud Computing and the Hype Cycle

“Hence we’d like to claim that the recent interest in cloud computing, taken in the context of prior developments on grid computing, the service paradigm and virtualization and over the infrastructure provided by the Internet, is actually the slow climb into the Slope of Enlightenment.  Experimentation will continue, and some attempts will still fail.  However the general trend will be toward mainstreaming.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Entity-Based Integration Model

“From a business standpoint, entity resolution (ER) is really the first step of a two-part process of integrating information about entities.  Entity reference records usually carry two types of attributes describing the entity, identifying attributes and informational attributes. Although the line between the two can be fuzzy, identifying attributes are those that describe the entity’s ‘characteristics,’ information that tends to persist over time and helps to distinguish one entity from another of the same type.”

Healthcare Technology Online: 10 Healthcare IT Trends To Watch In 2010

“According to the latest statistics from HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), only 0.5% of U.S. hospitals currently have a complete EMR (electronic medical record) system that provides data continuity throughout the institution. Hospitals and healthcare systems will install, integrate, and enhance EMR systems at an accelerated pace in an effort to demonstrate ‘meaningful use’ and capitalize on ARRA incentives.”

InformationWeek: Airline Security: The Technical Task Of Connecting Dots

“Pulling those data streams together–from federal agencies, law enforcement, foreign governments, and private sector companies–and getting that information to the right people quickly and in useable format are huge technical challenges. While there were obvious missed opportunities in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, including failure to take action with information in hand, it would be a mistake to underestimate the end-to-end data integration effort required as one of, simply, ‘connecting the dots.’”

ChannelWeb: Gartner: Cloud Computing Contributes To Mass IT Asset Exodus

“Cloud computing will take such a stranglehold on the market as companies try to reduce hardware spending that Gartner has made the bold proclamation that one-fifth of all businesses will own absolutely no IT assets come 2012.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Center for Advanced Public Safety: SHARE & PUSH

“While SHARE is strictly for communications between law enforcement and the state’s Fusion Center, a companion portal, called the Portal to Uphold a Secure Homeland (PUSH), was also developed as part of the USDHS ITEP project to support private sector security personnel who oversee critical infrastructure.”

HealthNewsDigest.com: Medical/Healthcare Privacy and Fraud Outlook for 2010

“You may not be aware of this, but medical-related fraud and identity theft are growing problems in America. With the exploding cost of healthcare, increasing bureaucratic administrative healthcare systems, and a large, aging Baby Boomer population requiring increased medical care, it would seem that we are entering into a kind of ‘perfect storm’ for medical fraud.”

Aerospace News & Views: Business Travel Association Calls for Greater Attention to Aviation Security

“NBTA has long supported risk-management programs that enhance aviation security. TSA’s Secure Flight helps to enhance domestic and international travel through the use of improved watch list matching, while the US-VISIT program collects biometric information from international travelers, both of which help to protect travelers and our nation. These programs should be used as readily available tools to improve the system that protects our global aviation security.”

[Wes Richel] Gartner: Simple Interop: Why We Don’t Seek a Top Level Domain Name

“Should anyone need a demonstration of the difficulties that delay reaching global agreements, consider that the term “EHR” has an idiosyncratic definition in the U.S. when compared to most of the world. In the U.S. the term refers to the record of patient information that is kept by an individual care delivery organization (CDO), with the proviso that there be some degree of interoperability. In most other countries that use the term it refers to some specific sharing of information that may be sourced from many places including but not limited to the electronic patient records of individual CDOs.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Citizen-Times: Lawmakers to mediate spat over Iowa Lottery security

“The investigation began after questions arose about a northwest Iowa store clerk who won the lottery six times in 12 months, collecting $264,000. The ombudsman’s report, called ‘Taking Chances on Integrity,’ included 60 recommendations for changes in lottery procedures and policies.”

Cheap Mommy: EHR Savings Go Beyond Time and Money

“The national government will pump billions of dollars into the transfer of medical records to electronic data in order to improve medical care and communications. Doctors, drugstores, hospitals and insurance companies will be more efficient with the utilization of electronic medical information. They will be able to exchange data instantaneously through electronic health networks, saving time and reducing the frustration of patients. Having electronic files can also guarantee greater privacy than hard-copy records. E-files can monitor exactly who has access to your medical data and log when it is accessed.”

SFGate: Forecast calls for more clouds in computing

“Cloud computing certainly had mindshare and now, for many people, it has credibility,’ said Ray Valdes, analyst with Gartner Research. ‘A lot of the initial anxieties have faded.’ Gartner ranks cloud computing its top strategic technology area for 2010 and forecasts that revenue will grow from about $56.3 billion in 2009 to $150.1 billion in 2013.”

[Wes Richel] Gartner:Simple Interop: The Health Internet Node

“The goal here is to establish a framework for secure communications among healthcare organizations and between healthcare organizations and patient/consumers. Although we propose some specific uses (protected email and transactions among EHRs) our premise is that the framework will support a much broader set of use cases and Internet technologies.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Data Fatigue

“Four years ago this week, a small aircraft lifted off from Watson Island in Miami. It was the plane’s 39,743rd flight. And as the tiny craft first vented white smoke and then lost its right wing in an explosion, it became clear that this was its last. All twenty people in the Grumman G73-T, including three infants, perished. The National Transportation Safety Board later determined that the culprit was metal fatigue.”

ovum: BI, EPM and EDW trends to watch out for in 2010

“For the mid-market and those new to BI, open source and BI software as a service (SaaS) will offer attractive alternatives. In the case of BI SaaS, increasing deployments of enterprise applications in the cloud by SMEs will act as a further driver for take-up of this option.”

destinationCRM.com: Electronic Health Records Get a Check-Up

“Hildreth references a 2009 New England Journal of Medicine survey indicating that close to 4 percent of physicians have a fully functional EHR system. About 13 percent of physicians’ offices have a basic EHR system in the works. Many organizations, Hildreth says, currently have bits and pieces of EHR, but not the full thing.”

insurancenewsnet.com: Hard-up Investigators Battle Against Rise In Comp Fraud

“While prosecution of various forms of insurance fraud is affected by budget constraints, the prosecution of underreporting of workers comp premiums by unscrupulous employers, or their outright failure to purchase the mandated coverage, may take the biggest hit, depending on each state’s priorities, Mr. Jay said.”

intelligent enterprise: Survey: BI Still Hindered By Technical Problems

“Specifically, the 2009 survey found that 29% of BI deployments were slightly successful and 47% were moderately successful. Only 21% of the respondents rated their deployments very successful.’A number of technical factors continue to contribute to — or hinder — stronger BI impact,’ the report said. ‘Data quality, reliability of the BI system and access to relevant data are the most important technical factors.’”

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By the Infoglide Team

Insurance Journal: Dallas-Area Employer Ordered to Repay Nearly $1M to Texas Mutual

“Texas Mutual Insurance Company reports that Donna Iverson, owner of C&D Business Services Inc., and Carol Wiesman pleaded guilty to workers’ compensation fraud-related charges. The 299th District Court in Austin sentenced Iverson and Wiesman to 10 years’ deferred adjudication and ordered them to repay $949,702 to Texas Mutual. Iverson and Wiesman were involved in a scheme from April 2003 through March 2006 to conceal business relationships and payroll records from Texas Mutual for C&D Business Services Inc. and C&D Services.”

CMAJ: Canadian physicians playing “catch-up” in adopting electronic medical records

“The Survey of Primary Care Physicians In Eleven Countries, 2009: Perspectives On Care, Costs, And Experiences found that only 37% of Canadian family physician respondents used electronic medical records in their practices, the lowest rate among the countries surveyed.”

public intelligence: Intelligence Fusion Centers

“These entities work under the auspices of local law enforcement, often integrating with the state’s police force, Department of Justice, or Office of Emergency Management… The following list is believed to be accurate at this time.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Santa Quality

“Santa Claus versus Saint Nicholas is an example of the use of nicknames which is a main issue in name matching in many cultures. It’s also important to observe that the German and Danish name is one word versus two words in English and French. Many company names and other names in respective languages shares the same linguistic characteristic.”

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