Identity Resolution Daily

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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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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[Post from Infoglide] Entity Resolution Metrics

“In the last post we looked at the problem of measuring the accuracy of entity resolution processes.  As with any accuracy measure, comparing to a known standard of correctness or benchmark is required.  However, even without a benchmark, other measures are also important in evaluating ER outcomes.”

SmartData Collective: MDM: Build or Buy?

“In the paper, I describe five core MDM functions that should drive a deliberate MDM strategy:

1. Data cleansing and correction
2. Metadata
3. Security and access services
4. Data migration
5. Identity resolution”

New York Times: The Rules on Names Could Bend a Little

“Given more precise information at booking, the T.S.A. expects to be able to match more precisely a passenger’s identity against those on the watch list. This should reduce the number of false positives — people who are flagged at security until it can be determined that they are not the person with a similar name who is on a watch list. ‘The Secure Flight watch-list matching process occurs before a passenger even gets to the airport,’ Mr. Leyh said. ‘So if you get a boarding pass, the Secure Flight watch-list matching process is done.’ In other words, you are clear once you get that pass.”

O’Reilly radar: Health gets personal in the cloud

“A Personal Health Record (PHR) is one way that patients can have some control of their own health data, while providing an interoperable platform for sharing relevant clinical data between providers. Healthcare is changing rapidly and there are some important trends worth watching. Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century.”

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By the Infoglide Team

NYTimes Dealbook: Insider Scheme Had Touches of James Bond

“Unlike the Galleon case, where senior officials at corporations passed tips on early earnings estimates to people at the fund, the Goffer case centers on allegations that may sound more familiar to students of the insider trading scandals of 25 years ago — early tips about deals from the people involved in doing them. According to the criminal complaints, Mr. Cutillo passed the information along through a friend, Jason C. Goldfarb, 31, who specialized in workers compensation law at a private firm in Brooklyn and who was also arrested on Thursday.”

Computerworld: Data quality vendors missing the mark, study finds

“One-fifth of respondents felt data quality is a prerequisite to an MDM initiative and wanted to see more vendor offerings integrating those two areas. Hayler says one would expect vendor partnerships between the areas of data quality and MDM, and that is precisely what is currently happening in the industry.”

docinthemachine: Encrypt EHR — Else HIPAA Violations Need Be Reported To Government & Media

“For example, if a physician maintains patient information in a laptop computer containing the unsecured information of more than 500 patients and the laptop is stolen, the physician would be required to notify not only the patients affected by the breach, but would likely need to also notify the DHHS and the media. A medical practice need not report a breach if the patient information has been properly encrypted – because information that is encrypted is not considered ‘unsecure.’”

Initiate Blog: The Brittle Nature of Data Warehouses

“Usually, only a small percentage of the data are ever used. So why bother? The TCO for extracting, copying, converting, transferring, transforming, integrating, propagating, backing-up, loading, and verifying the data skyrockets far beyond its value and injects significant risk and brittleness into the entire ecosystem.”

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[Post from Infoglide] The Other Half of Entity Resolution

“In a recent post, Jonathan McDonald quotes one definition of entity resolution: ‘According to Gartner, entity resolution is ‘the capability to resolve multiple labels for individuals, products or other noun classes of data into a single resolved entity when pseudonyms, alias names or other synonym-style constructs exist.’ …While the definition nicely captures the value of ‘first degree’ entity resolution, it falls short by omitting non-obvious relationship detection.”

iHealthBeat: Study: U.S. Lags Behind Many Other Countries in EHR Use

“The study found that 46% of U.S. physicians use electronic health records, up from 28% in 2006. The researchers found that 99% of doctors in the Netherlands use EHRs. Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the U.K. also reported EHR adoption rates of 94% or higher. “

data quality PRO: Profit by Data Quality Best Practices

“Insurers use data to manage litigation, detect fraudulent claims and limit financial exposure to claims through reinsurance, but this practice works only when the data is credible. It is no overstatement that sound, profitable property / casualty operations begin – and end – with quality data.”

Federal News Radio: What airline passengers need to know about TSA’s Secure Flight program

“The information is then used ‘behind the scenes’ to match against the No-Fly list. ‘It’s a behind the scenes process,’ said Leyh. ‘If you get to the airport and you have your boarding pass, the Secure Flight part of it, and the watch list matching part of it, is over. It’s done with.’”

information management: Inefficiency as a Standard in Product Information Management

“Managing product information across a large organization consists of much more than making sure prices and descriptions are accurate and consistent. Large manufacturers and retailers employ teams of people tasked with the job of cross checking product data. While the deployment of these teams is a good idea in theory, the process is loaded with inefficiency and errors are all but guaranteed.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Measuring Entity Resolution Accuracy

“In the last post we looked at the problem of comparing two entity resolution (ER) outcomes.  If S represents a list of entity references, then the effect of applying an ER process is to divide S into subsets where each subset comprises all of the references to the same entity.”

Cloud Avenue: Gartner Says Cloud Computing Is The Top Technology Trend In 2010

“Compared to the beginning of 2009, the cloud computing landscape now is very different with a huge potential to change the face of IT forever.”

iHealthBeat: Blumenthal: Officials Working To Boost EHR Connectivity, Security

“Blumenthal also addressed concerns about whether EHR systems would compromise the privacy and security of personal health data. He said regulations are in place to ensure that any health data used for research purposes are stripped of all individually identifiable information.”

Informatica Blog: Data Sharing and Privacy - Eternally Opposed?

“Nevertheless, the risks to privacy from data breaches and concerns about government access to vast stores of private citizen information continue to be recurring themes in today’s security environment. But do the benefits of complete and actionable data always conflict with the desire to secure and maintain privacy?”

Workers’ Comp Insider: Fraud is on the rise

“Steve Tuckey is currently writing an in-depth series on fraud for Risk and Insurance. The first installment, Transparency of Evidence, deals with fraud by doctors, hospitals and other healthcare professionals. He notes that ‘grayer areas of so-called abuse or overutilization continue to vex payers, insurance companies and lawmakers eager to maintain the financial stability and integrity of the system that has protected workers for nearly a century.’”

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By the Infoglide Team

information management: Multi-Entity MDM Enablement

“Most efforts, however, are executed in surroundings inhibited by existing infrastructure (legacy applications, tools, hardware and integration), dispersed organizational structures and suboptimal processes. This reality introduces challenges in architecting and deploying efficient and effective multi-entity MDM solutions.”

BAM INTEL: BAM’s Thinking on the New DHS Standards

“Public Fusion Centers must be seen by citizens and policy-makers to play a direct role in the response to disasters as well as intelligence gathering. They cannot remain in the intelligence-sharing role only and not take some of the spotlight when their good work prevents or lessens the impact of America’s next disaster.”

newsday.com: OPINION: Revolution right in your doctor’s hand

“For doctors and their patients (in other words, all of us), the electronic health record is a far more revolutionary idea than those that brought us the ability to download a song, post a video online or read and send e-mails when you’re on a camping trip. While those other innovations indirectly enhance the quality of life, they are designed for entertainment or business purposes. The EHR directly improves quality of life because the end result of its design is better health.”

SmartData Collective: Data May Require Unique Data Quality Processes

“All data quality projects can appear the same from afar but ultimately can be as different as stars and planets. One of the biggest ways they vary is in the data itself and whether it is chiefly made up of name and address data or some other type of data.”

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By the Infoglide Team

revenueXL: Web based EMR - ASP vs. SaaS? Should you really care?

“SaaS applications differ from ASP applications in that SaaS solutions are developed specifically to leverage web technologies such as the browser, thereby making them web-native. The database design and architecture of SaaS applications are specifically built with ‘multi-tenancy’ in mind, thereby enabling multiple tenants (customers or users) to access a shared data model. An ASP application on the other hand in most cases is a typical Client-Server application (meant for a single client) that is accessed over the internet and therefore includes an independent instance of Database that is specifically meant for your medical office.”

The Data Asset: Closing the Loop: Selecting the Right Technology

“Data management tools include those for data profiling, data quality and identity resolution. Measures that need to be addressed include data standardization, pattern standardization, address verification, and adherence to business rules.”

Homeland Security: DHS Announces New Information-Sharing Tool to Help Fusion Centers Combat Terrorism

“State and major urban area fusion centers provide critical links for information sharing between and across all levels of government, and help fulfill key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. This initiative will serve as a valuable resource to enhance situational awareness and support more timely and complete analysis of national security threats.”

ITBusinessEdge: Seven Data Integration Trends

“Master data management, which should be an enterprisewide endeavor, is being deployed for tactical purposes. The result? MDM projects support specific business needs and aren’t fully integrated across the enterprise.”

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[Post from Infoglide] To Move or Not to Move: That is the Question

A continual theme at IdentityResolutionDaily is maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of data at all times. Two recent posts concerned fusion centers and citizen profiling, but the same issues apply to virtually any application of entity resolution technology. The fact is that, in some cases, anonymous identity resolution is a requirement for more sensitive identity resolution implementations.

GCN: Entity resolution’s growing role in security efforts

“Research firm and consultancy Gartner has been tracking the entity-resolution market for several years. ‘Entity resolution and analysis was previously an obscure technology that has come to the forefront as a result of world events and market forces where it is used to identify the use of false identities and networks of individuals who are attempting to hide their relationships to each other,’ stated Gartner in ‘Hype Cycle for Master Data Management,’ a report released in June.”

iHealthBeat: Consensus Needed on EHR Access, Privacy Issues, Panelists Say

“Panelists noted that although some patients want the ability to segregate and mask certain sections of their EHRs, physicians are wary of protections that would deny them access to critical patient medical information.”

Security Management: Fusion Centers Forge Ahead

“More than 70 operate at the state, regional, and urban levels. The question eight years after 9-11 is: How well are these centers fulfilling their goals of information collection, analysis, and dissemination—and to the extent that these efforts are falling short, what remains to be done to meet the goals and to ensure the future sustainability of these centers?”

SmartData Collective: Poor Data Quality is a Virus

“Poor data quality is a viral contaminant that will undermine the operational, tactical, and strategic initiatives essential to the enterprise’s mission to survive and thrive in today’s highly competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace. Left untreated or unchecked, this infectious agent will negatively impact the quality of business decisions.”

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