Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

Media Health Leaders Media: Detroit Doc Gets Six Years for Medicare Fraud

“Myint, of Bloomfield Hills, MI, was also ordered to pay more than $3.1 million in restitution, jointly with co-defendants, and to serve two years of supervised release following his prison term. Terrence Hicks, of Jackson, MI, the patient recruiter, was ordered to pay more than $4.9 million in restitution, jointly with co-defendants, and to serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.”

AolTravel: Is the No-Fly List Working?

“‘The TSA is hoping to smooth glitches with the new Secure Flight program — a system by which the ‘TSA will conduct uniform prescreening of passenger information against federal government watchlists,’ according to an official statement. ‘The TSA is taking over this responsibility from the airlines.’ The TSA says the Secure Flight system will be in effect for all domestic flights by mid-2010 and all international flights by the end of 2010, at which time the latest two-hour notification rule will become moot (since the airlines will no longer be responsible). Meanwhile, in the case of Shahzad, Kahn says it’s important to remember that the current system — for all its perceived faults related to his near escape — ultimately did what it was meant to do.”

ITBusinessEdge: Baby Steps to Master Data Management

“If you want to start small with master data management, you’ve got to start with a noun, says Evan Levy, a partner at Baseline Consulting  and an instructor with The Data Warehousing Institute… The problem is, IT doesn’t think in nouns. IT is all about the verb: Defining, coding, testing, supporting. What’s more, IT departments tend to view the world in terms of projects – fulfilling this feature request, upgrading to this release, migrating to this server.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Aadhar (or Aadhaar)

“In Denmark we have had such an identifier (one for citizens and one for companies) for many years. It is not used by everyone everywhere – so you still are able to make money being a data quality professional specializing in data matching. The main reason that the unique citizen identifier is not used all over is of course privacy considerations.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Fraud Magazine: Suspicious Activity Reports

“Ultimately, the defendant admitted making numerous deposits of less than $10,000 each to avoid triggering bank filing of the Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) required for all activity involving five figures or more. In a single month, he made nearly 30 such deposits at a number of banks, totaling more than $260,000. Later, in almost 20 transactions at various branches of a single bank, he deposited an additional $185,000. That bank promptly filed a SAR detailing how the mortgage broker had deposited into his personal and business accounts sums ranging from $9,000 to $9,800.”

GCN: State fusion centers look to expand beyond counterterrorism efforts

“The development of fusion centers has faced some significant challenges. First and foremost, the centers must overcome the practical challenge of integrating data. Even in the same state, you can have 500 police departments using different software to manage their [computer-aided design] and intelligence needs,” Serrao said. And generally that data is saved in different formats.”

Community of Experts: Future of MDM – Master Policy Management?

“However, as the thought processes for establishing a business case for MDM mature, we are starting to see where the desire for the unified view is not completely dependent on an instantiation of a single consolidated repository. Instead, in these situations the business needs are supported by the availability of master data services implementing consistent information policies across an extended enterprise… the consistent application of policies can be done both in the presence of a unified repository or as a federated collection of common repositories!”

Worker’s Compensation Law Center: IL: Chiropractor, Physician Among Three Defendants Indicted in Alleged $1 Million Health Care Fraud Scheme

“As part of the scheme, Minnis allegedly forged and caused others to forge physicians’ signatures on various documents falsely representing that services, treatment, physical therapy and/or testing had been provided, ordered or supervised by medical doctors. Minnis allegedly forged the doctors’ signatures, and caused them to sign reports without having done patient exams, knowing that Workers’ Comp would not accept a chiropractor’s opinions or reports as medical evidence to support patients’ claims.”

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By Mike Shultz, Infoglide Software CEO

Andrew White of Gartner recently posed a question about whether master data management (MDM) is dead. He didn’t actually suggest that the demise of master data management is imminent. He was challenging whether our current terminology adequately clarifies the current reality about MDM and associated product areas.

Certainly the terms describing many markets and types of products are being associated with MDM. Jackie Roberts of DATAForge pointed out that the definition of MDM now seems to include “data integrity, data quality, entity resolution, matching, data integration, governance, metrics and analysis.”

While entity resolution was mentioned in her list, our obsessive focus on entity resolution (aka identity resolution) leads to the conclusion that, rather than being subsumed, its role is growing. Wayne Eckerson at TDWI seems to agree that identity resolution is a critical component of the recent MDM acquisitions. In his post about the acquisitions by Informatica and IBM of Siperian and Initiate Systems, respectively, he described the two transactions this way:

“You could say that Siperian is mostly MDM, but with identity resolution and other capabilities, whereas Initiate is mostly about identity resolution, but with MDM and other capabilities.”

Identity resolution is becoming an integral part of many product areas. Within MDM itself, creating a single-entity view is best done with an identity resolution engine. Data mining is greatly enhanced by the addition of entity resolution. Dan Power of Hub Solution Designs wrote about how key identity resolution is to data matching. We’ve talked about how social CRM can resolve identities of individuals across multiple disparate data sources using identity resolution, as well as “rationalize multiple variations and errors and anomalies that block finding existing customers within their systems”.

Although identity resolution technology has been years in the making, it has only recently risen into the consciousness of most analysts and customers. Because of its ability to bring enhanced clarity to ambiguous data, advanced identity resolution is now beginning to have a significant impact across many data-centered disciplines.

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By the Infoglide Team

IT-Director.com: The Informatica Event

[Philip Howard] “To begin with, the company talked about its acquisition of Siperian. I have already commented on this but one point that emerged at the conference was the way that Informatica describes Siperian as infrastructure MDM as opposed to application MDM. This is a hitherto unrecognised distinction (with respect to terminology) in the MDM market. Informatica distinguishes the former from the latter by saying that infrastructure MDM is domain and data model independent.”

Workforce Management: Medical Clinic Owners Plead No Contest to $60 Million Workers’ Compensation Fraud

“Investigators alleged that the pair purchased thousands of workers’ compensation client referrals from an attorney television advertising service. Clients were then sent to doctors who had a relationship with Premier, which would handle billing and collection work in return for a 50 percent fee for money they collected. Clients were then sent to attorneys who had a business relationship with Fish and Bacino, investigators allege. ‘Getting kickbacks for referring medical payments is illegal and drives up the costs in the system,’ California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said in a statement.”

SignalScape: DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier Describes How Technology Is Changing Police Work in the Capitol

“The MPD also established a fusion center, which is responsible for the national capitol region. From a homeland security perspective, Chief Lanier said that the center collects and stores crime and terror alerts into a data warehouse.”

Injured Workers’ Law Firm Blog: Insurance Fraud Is a Huge Crime

“The fraudulent claims that can be made through insurance companies are categorized as being soft or hard. Soft fraud is the most common type of fraud and usually takes place when someone exaggerates a claim being made. Hard fraud takes place when someone deliberately plans a deceptive act such as a collision or the theft of their vehicle.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Architectures for Entity Resolution

“In the last post we looked at a formal model for describing entity-based integration. Now let’s turn our attention to how entity resolution (ER) systems are actually implemented.  One of the most important design decisions is whether the system will perform entity identity management.  Systems perform identity management when they create and store the attributes values for the identities that they process.”

tdwi: IBM and Informatica Acquire MDM Capabilities

“The two acquisitions focus the spotlight on two of the hottest functions today, in terms of user organizations adopting them, namely: MDM and identity resolution. More than ever, organizations need trusted data, in support of regulatory reporting, compliance, business intelligence, analytics, operational excellence, and other data-driven requirements. MDM and identity resolution are key enablers for these requirements, so it’s no surprise that two leading vendors have chosen to acquire these at this time.”

PoliceGrantsHelp.com: Building fusion centers for the next decade

“Serrao says that in the time he has spent in a dozen different fusion centers in the United States — coupled with his own background in law enforcement — he’s gleaned several ‘best practices’ for consideration. Ideally, he says, leadership should ’set a specific strategic mission before the center is even built. Everything else follows. Determine the role of the center and whether strategic intelligence analysis will be part of the mix. Then, it will be easier to define what processes will be developed, what reporting mechanisms are needed, what technology is appropriate, and what types of personnel are needed.’”

Prudent Press Agency: Kansas Takes Action Against Lottery Fraud

“The state of Kansas has been conducting sting operations to prevent this kind of theft by lottery terminal clerks. Law enforcement agents fanned out across the state and presented ‘winning’ tickets at several retail lottery outlets. In five separate cases clerks told the agents the tickets were worthless and then tried to redeem the ‘winning’ lottery tickets. The undercover investigation led to charges of attempted theft and computer crime against five people across the state.”

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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] The Big Story: Evolution

“Technology writer Chris Calnan’s story opened with a comment about Infoglide that nicely sums up the evolution of the broader market for identity resolution and entity analytics: ‘The market may have finally caught up with Infoglide Software Corp.’s technology.’”

OCDQ Blog: Beyond a “Single Version of the Truth”

“However, in his excellent book Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset, Thomas Redman explains: ‘A fiendishly attractive concept is… ‘a single version of the truth’…the logic is compelling…unfortunately, there is no single version of the truth. For all important data, there are…too many uses, too many viewpoints, and too much nuance for a single version to have any hope of success. This does not imply malfeasance on anyone’s part; it is simply a fact of life. Getting everyone to work from a single version of the truth may be a noble goal, but it is better to call this the ‘one lie strategy’ than anything resembling truth.’”

RISK&INSURANCE: States of Disparity

“Risk & Insurance® looked at four factors that indicate how well a state’s workers’ comp system may be working. Those factors were adjusted by giving additional weight to the amount of premium charged to the employer, and the benefits paid to claimants. The states are ranked by their composite score.”

Security Management: DHS Official Outlines Federal Support to State-based Fusion Centers

“To better facilitate information sharing, Johnson promised DHS will deploy personnel to all fusion centers while giving fusion centers access to the Homeland Security Data Network by the end of fiscal year 2010. Currently, I&A has 44 field representatives based in fusion centers nationwide. I&A will also manage the newly created Joint Fusion Center-Program Management Office (JFC-PMO), which Napolitano tasked in October with coordinating how DHS’ various components and other federal agencies will support fusion centers.”

MedicExchange.com: EMR likely to boom throughout 2013

“Health IT currently is growing at an 11 percent annual rate, and solid growth should continue at least through 2013, which would be the third year of the federal EMR stimulus program here in the States, the Scientia report forecasts. In that time frame, health IT will increase its market share by a quarter, to 5 percent of global healthcare products sales from the current 4 percent.”

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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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By the Infoglide Team

Come by and see us at TDWI World in Orlando Nov. 3 & 4, Booth 405

The Emculturated World: Unmanage Master Data Management

“MDM breaks down in the moment it becomes divorced from a practical, immediate attempt to capture just what is needed today. The moment it attempts to “bank” standard symbols ahead of their usage, the MDM process becomes speculative, and proscriptive.”

Governing: Can I Say No to an Electronic Health Record?

“In some instances, patients don’t even know their information is being shared. For example, if consumers turn over prescription drug records when applying for life insurance, the insurer will sometimes hand off the information to business partners who then hand it off to data miners. To keep a tighter grip on privacy, Deven McGraw, director of health privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, would like a set of rules that all organizations in the health IT world would have to follow.”

Related post: “Applying Identity Resolution to Patient Identification Integrity”

San Antonio Express-News: McManus recalls 9-11 at GEOINT summit

“Bart Johnson, acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis with the Homeland Security Department, said cooperation is improving, although problems remain with security clearances and interdepartmental connectivity. ‘The federal government can only do so much in getting it down to the street level,’ Johnson said. Homeland security and Justice Department officials have formed 72 “fusion centers” — terrorism prevention and response centers where federal agencies work with the military, local law enforcement and private partners. Three are in Texas: Austin, Dallas and Collin County near Dallas.”

information management: From Search to Explore

“It’s no surprise that people are looking at more and more internal and external resources for informed decision-making. In the internal case, data integration is a foundation of master data management as well. But integration for BI to common visual tools is increasingly taking place in subsystems, relational databases and cubes, and the visualization layer itself.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Come by and see us at TDWI World in Orlando Nov. 3 & 4!

Forbes.com: Who Is In Charge Of Your Data?

[Dan Woods] “But in most companies, no single person is charged with the task of making sure that the right data is being captured in an efficient way that ensures data quality. The Data Warehousing Institute estimated the annual cost of poor data quality at $600 billion in 2002. Other studies have produced similar estimates.”

Austin American Statesman: Clerk accused of absconding with lottery cash

“So when the 25-year-old quit his job at the convenience store and claimed a $1 million lottery jackpot in Austin, Joshi’s co-workers were suspicious and told investigators, the affidavit said. Those investigators now believe that in May, after a regular customer brought in his lottery tickets and asked Joshi to check if they were winners, Joshi kept the winning ticket, did not tell the customer and claimed the prize for himself, according to the affidavit and Travis County Assistant District Attorney Patty Robertson.”

Hartford Business: State Recommits To Fighting Shadow Labor

“The state board charged with cracking down on employers who fail to pay employee taxes and workers’ compensation premiums will meet on Nov. 5, following a 10-month hiatus.”

cnet news: Gartner: Brace yourself for cloud computing

“Cloud computing takes several forms, from the nuts and bolts of Amazon Web Services to the more finished foundation of Google App Engine to the full-on application of Salesforce.com. Companies should figure out what if any of those approaches are most suited to their challenges, Gartner said.”

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