“A total of 389 guards and other workers have filed more than 500 claims, including about 290 still pending. About 230 of these claimed injury for the underlying cause of ‘repetitive trauma,’ including carpal tunnel syndrome, an injury of the wrist. The prison employs about 760 workers, of which 567 are guards. ‘The Department of Insurance is investigating recent questions raised in connection with workers’ compensation claims filed against the state of Illinois at the Menard Correctional Center,’ department spokesman Louis Pukelis said Tuesday in a written statement.”
“As states and localities have put up fusion centers designed precisely to overcome this, however, they’ve had to face a different challenge: ensuring not only the quantity but the quality of information they collect and report. In candid conversations with Homeland Security Today, leading privacy advocates, scholars and state law enforcement and federal officials addressed some of the key facets of this challenge, as well as steps that can be taken to ensure that fusion centers live up to their full potential as a counterterrorism tool.”
“North Carolina’s Medicaid fraud investigators pulled in millions last year through dozens of cases of fraud and patient abuse, the state’s attorney general’s office reported Monday. The office’s Medicaid Investigations Unit prosecuted 22 criminal convictions and 18 civil settlements, recovering $53.5 million, during the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to a press release from N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper.”
“Needless to say, it’s a huge deal. Gartner recently put cloud computing at the top of its list of top strategic technologies for 2011 and it’s far from the only expert extolling the glory of the Web-hosted software and infrastructure. For small businesses, the significance of this primarily comes down to cost. In many cases, using cloud-based infrastructure is cheaper than running and maintaining one’s own physical servers.”
“We have a new Congress and a new House majority leader as of this week’s swearing in ceremony. The current House majority party (R) plans to pass a bill to repeal the ‘Obamacare’ bill passed during the last session by the former House majority party (D). Both parties make ‘fact based’ arguments about why killing or keeping the bill will reduce the deficit, yet both can’t be right. This isn’t a political blog, and I’m not going to take a side on this issue. What struck me is how often we use ‘facts’ to bolster our argument, with ‘facts’ defined as any real data that can be massaged or misinterpreted to suggest that our desired outcome appears to be the best one.”
“When she arrived at the screening area, her husband’s incorrect name had already been checked against a list of potential security threats and had passed. Once passengers receive their boarding passes, the Secure Flight process is already complete, according to the TSA.”
“Identity matching requires matching practitioners to decide which collection of fields best allows the correct matching of one record with another. The choice can be made from fields such as name, date of birth, address details, sex / gender, and even unique identifier values (when they exist). The use of sex / gender in that process might be seen in a slightly different light.”
“Under the bill, the commission would establish procedures for the payment of winning tickets holders, which may include crediting amounts won to a player’s account or direct deposit into a player’s account at a financial institution… The commission would also be directed to ensure that the program includes security measures to protect against fraud, prevent wagering by underage persons and protect the personal and financial information of players.”
We have a new Congress and a new House majority leader as of this week’s swearing in ceremony. The current House majority party (R) plans to pass a bill to repeal the “Obamacare” bill passed during the last session by the former House majority party (D). Both parties make “fact based” arguments about why killing or keeping the bill will reduce the deficit, yet both can’t be right.
This isn’t a political blog, and I’m not going to take a side on this issue. What struck me is how often we use “facts” to bolster our argument, with “facts” defined as any real data that can be massaged or misinterpreted to suggest that our desired outcome appears to be the best one. Actual data is often plentiful but our preference for one alternative keeps us from embracing and promoting reality.
So mishandling the truth when you have all the facts you need is a conscious action. What happens when you think you have the data needed to make a rational decision but you aren’t conscious of important information that could totally change your perception? For example, we may have access to what look like sufficient pieces of information to reach a rational business decision, such as a driver’s license with a photo ID or a computed credit score based on the person’s history of business transactions.
However, what’s often missing from the decision process is knowledge about relationships between people. Understanding these relationships – who’s who, who knows who, and other non-obvious connections – can increase beneficial decisions in a colossal way, yet awareness of these relationships is rarely incorporated into the process.
Since entity resolution can increase the accuracy of business processes by an order of magnitude, our New Year’s resolution here at Infoglide is to introduce as many people as possible to its benefits.
“Strategic decisions about cloud computing should both draw upon and inform the EA. An organization must have a mature and well formed understanding of its architecture components (e.g., business processes, services, applications and data) to make meaningful decisions related to cloud computing, such as whether a move to the cloud is advantageous, what services most lend themselves to a cloud deployment, and what cloud deployment model (e.g., private, public) makes the most sense. There are three key roles for EA in facilitating cloud computing strategy and planning…”
“‘Medicaid cheaters rob taxpayers, hurt needy patients and push medical costs higher for all of us,’ Cooper said in a statement. ‘We’re stopping the waste and abuse and making violators pay.’ During the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Medicaid Investigations Unit of the state Attorney General’s Office won 22 criminal convictions and negotiated 18 civil settlements worth $53.5 million.”
“Under Secure Flight, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) prescreens passenger name, date of birth and gender against terrorist watchlists before passengers receive their boarding passes. In addition to facilitating secure travel for all passengers, the program helps prevent the misidentification of passengers who have names similar to individuals on government watchlists. Prior to Secure Flight, airlines held responsibility for checking passengers against watchlists.”
Looking back over the past year, we’re especially grateful for relationships we’ve built and grown with customers and partners. Despite a less than stellar economy, 2010 provided another good year of growth for Infoglide Software.
2010 also proved to be a year of accelerated visibility for identity resolution and entity analytics in general. Industry consolidation moves (e.g., IBM’s March acquisition of Initiate Systems) demonstrate the critical importance of entity resolution in the new era of Big Data that has been developing.
For the readers of IdentityResolutionDaily, please accept our thanks for your continuing interest and participation in the exciting growth of this market. 2010 promises to be a year of continued change and challenge, and we look forward to the opportunities it offers.
We’ll start with new posts again in January.
Happy Holidays, and Best Wishes for a Wonderful 2011!
“Professional analysts and law enforcement officers from more than 15 different agencies including the FBI, ATF, DEA, US Marshall’s, Homeland Security, and state and county partners work from one large room to put out intelligence products in a truly collaborative environment that defines New Jersey’s fusion center. Products include crime mapping with predictive analysis to help local departments know when and where crimes are likely to occur in the future.”
“Morgan’s prison sentence will be followed by three years of supervised release. Morgan was ordered to pay restitution of $2,804,462. Morgan, 64, was convicted in October 2008, of 69 counts of health care fraud, following a two-week jury trial in Albany. Michael J. Moore, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, said the indictment charged that for a period of several years ending in August 2007, Morgan, a registered pharmacist and the owner of Thrift Center Pharmacy in Camilla, executed a scheme to defraud the Georgia Medicaid program, which is jointly funded with state and federal funds.
“TCSPs are often involved in some way in the establishment and administration of most legal persons and arrangements; and accordingly in many jurisdictions they play a key role as the gatekeepers for the financial sector. This report provides a number of case studies which demonstrate that TCSPs have often been used, wittingly or unwittingly, in the conduct of money laundering activities.”
“We talked a week ago about the rapidly emerging market space called Big Data. One statistic that opened my eyes is Gartner’s prediction that the volume of new data generated by enterprises will grow by 650% in the next five years, and 80% of that will be unstructured data! The 451Group’s definition of Big Data describes a growing need for non-traditional processes that can treat massive amounts of data as a whole, thereby making it impossible to use many traditional tools and techniques.”
“These tools will integrate many of the agency’s pilot programs into the National Fraud Prevention Program and complement the work of the joint HHS and Department of Justice Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT). ‘Preventing fraud is more effective than the old ‘pay and chase’ model of fighting fraud after a sham provider has been paid and disappeared,” CMS administrator Donald Berwick said in a statement. “By using new predictive modeling analytic tools we are better able to expand our efforts to save the millions — and possibly billions — of dollars wasted on waste, fraud, and abuse.’”
“Concerns that internal initiatives, and the CIO’s clout, will be gutted and most funds redirected to the cloud are overstated–for now. But we are at an inflection point: IT has money to spend, but it can’t be allocated using the same old budget process that’s kept us in a rut of dedicating a third or more of our resources to keeping the lights on. Business leaders have little patience for high-priced, long-term IT slogs. They’ve seen massive 18-month projects fail and experienced success with lightweight software-as-a-service offerings. CIOs must look at each expenditure and think, ‘Will this buy us flexibility and advance the business?’”
The 451Group’s definition of Big Data describes a growing need for non-traditional processes that can treat massive amounts of data as a whole, thereby making it impossible to use many traditional tools and techniques. Data is voluminous, complex, and very dynamic, yet business drivers demand that it be captured, managed, and harnessed to benefit the organization.
While entity resolution (ER) software is technologically mature, the evolving requirements for managing Big Data fit ER perfectly. For example, Infoglide’s Identity Resolution Engine (IRE) scales to meet Big Data requirements, and together with its flexibility in handling ambiguous unstructured and structured data with missing elements makes it an ideal solution for wringing value from the “data deluge” we increasingly find ourselves in.
One of the unique problems associated with Big Data is its multiple disparate sources that include email, Word documents, spreadsheets, and social media such as IM, newsfeeds, Facebook, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. Again, entity resolution systems like IRE now include support for multiple data forms and have created special ways to incorporate social media.
So, while Big Data presents a daunting challenge for many organizations, flexible technologies like entity resolution represent a key element of any solution.
“Results from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) show that between 2009 and 2010, the percentage of physicians reporting having an electronic medical record/electronic health record (EMR/EHR) system that meets the criteria of a basic system increased by 14% and a fully functional system increased by 46%.”
“In the global marketplace, businesses, suppliers and customers are creating and consuming vast amounts of information. Gartner predicts that enterprise data in all forms will grow 650 percent over the next five years. According to IDC, the world’s volume of data doubles every 18 months. This flood of data, often referred to as “information overload,” “data deluge” and “big data,” clearly creates a challenge for business leaders.”
“Early this year, Gartner suggested that a ‘data deluge’ has begun. In his recent Dataspora Blog post about ‘Big Data’ and what it means, author Michael Driscoll presents a unique and interesting perspective on the massive amounts of data being generated and stored. According to The 451 Group’s definition…”
“Gartner released a report in November entitled, ‘Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting Information Infrastructure, 2011.’ Two of the top ten trends were ‘Entity Resolution and Analysis’ and ‘Master Data Management.’”
“According to Taxpayers Against Fraud, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., National Medical then launched a campaign to force Ven-A-Care out of business. But in fighting back, Ven-A-Care staff discovered National Medical was paying kickbacks to doctors who prescribed medicines and services that weren’t needed, then billing Medicare and Medicaid exorbitant sums far in excess of what the medicines and services cost. The Justice Department eventually got a $486 million settlement from National Medical — and Ven-A-Care received $40 million as its reward under the False Claims Act.”
“Russian financial institutions reported 120 trillion roubles (2.44 trillion pounds) of suspicious transactions to the anti-money laundering watchdog in the first nine months of 2010, the Kommersant daily reported on Monday.”
Infoglide Software provides entity resolution and analysis solutions for retail, banking, insurance, government, and law enforcement. Without the need for data cleansing or warehousing, Infoglide Software's Identity Resolution Engine™ (IRE) analyzes all of the information relating to individuals and/or entities from multiple sources of data and then applies...
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