Identity Resolution Daily

[Post from Infoglide] The Talk of the ACFE Conference

“The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) held its annual conference and exhibition in Washington, DC this week.  Through the keynote address and the plethora of wonderful speakers, one message became loud and clear - fraudsters are becoming more and more creative in finding ways to circumvent your policies…”

A Software Insider’s Point of View: Research Report: Rethink Your Next Generation Business Intelligence Strategy

“A confluence of changing business requirements and on-going vendor consolidation leads many organizations to rethink their business intelligence (BI) strategies… Ensure the systems supports multi-channel heterogeneous data sources.  Do not stay dependent on ERP systems for primary sources of data.  Expect a rapidly changing business environment that rewards flexibility.”

Center for Investigative Reporting: Ex-cop says makers of data-mining software must recognize intel rules

“The idea is for police in your area to better share essential information about possible criminal and terrorist threats with their federal counterparts, poor communication being one of the reasons why the terrorist hijackings were allowed to occur in the first place. Civil libertarians have repeatedly expressed concern that the centers are stockpiling too much personal data about Americans who haven’t committed a crime in the hope that some piece of it can be ‘fused’ with another to unravel a terrorist plot. Serrao and his colleagues counter that organizations like the ACLU ‘have no clue’ what’s actually being collected and analyzed at fusion centers.”

Visible IT: Numbers, Names, and User IDs

“Patrick rightly notes that, by definition, how a person spells his name is the correct way to spell it and by definition does not have ‘invalid characters’. It’s perhaps more correct to say that the computer system can’t handle the way a person represents their name. There are extreme cases of course such as TAFKAP and Wolfe+585, where people deliberately try to sabotage Our Modern World with unpronounceable or uncontainable names. But sometimes even the most benign names can cause computer systems fits.”

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By the Infoglide Team

CNSNews.com: New Regulations Outline Content, Transmission Standards for Every Americans’ Electronic Health Records

“The EHRs are designed to be digital replications of the hard-copy, paper health records commonly in use today. They are also engineered to be easily transferable among different doctors and hospitals so as to eliminate the creation of duplicate or disparate records among different health care providers, thus allowing any health care office to access a patient’s complete medical record at each visit.”

Washington Post: Firms slow to embrace cloud computing

“‘There’s an awful lot of talk about it and there is consumption of cloud,’ said Al Gillen, an analyst at IDC. But ‘organizations don’t simply make change because they can. There has to be good justification.’ Harry Weller, a general partner at New Enterprise Associates, said start-ups and new businesses will likely be among the first to move to the cloud. A need to hold down costs is often an overriding factor in their decision, he said.”

Detroit Free Press: Arrests made for Medicare fraud

“Many of the charges involved home health care companies that billed Medicare for equipment or treatment that many patients didn’t need or never received. In several cases, people who worked for the companies were paid to recruit patients to participate in the scheme. Some persuaded elderly people to sell their Medicare identification numbers, which were used to rip off the system.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Data Quality is an Ingredient, not an Entrée

“Fortunately it is more and more recognized that you don’t get success with Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management, Master Data Management, Service Oriented Architecture and many more disciplines without starting with improving your data quality. But it will be a big mistake to see Data Quality improvement as an entrée before the main course being BI, CRM, MDM, SOA or whatever is on the menu.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Information Management: 10 Key Trends In MDM

“During 2010, independent/standalone data quality vendors (Clavis, Pitney Bowes, Human Inference and Trillium) will focus on name and address cleansing as they struggle against better-funded match/merge and data profiling capabilities increasingly integrated with megavendor MDM. Also at this time, a dearth of non-aligned matching algorithms (such as those from Digital Trowel, Infoglide, Omikron and Uniserve) will engender ‘algorithm envy’ among disenfranchised MDM providers.”

NewCityPatch: Legislator: Rockland Should Review Medicaid Spending

“Rockland County Legislator Ed Day, R-New City, has called for a review of Medicaid spending by the county that would also determine whether enough is being done to prevent and detect Medicaid fraud. ‘Medicaid expenditures represent an amount that is 110 percent of all the property taxes collected here in Rockland,’ said Day.”

Canadian Immigration: Canada should improve its AML efforts according to US report

“The most significant area of concern is organized crime. Canadian Security Intelligence Service estimates that there are about 750 organized crime groups operating in Canada and 80% of them are involved in the illicit drug trade. The cross-border movement of currency was identified as a continued concern.”

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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

ITBusinessEdge: TIBCO Makes MDM Move, but Where Is Oracle?

“There are still options, Karel writes, including S3 Matching Technologies, Syslore or identity resolution/matching vendor Infoglide Software. But if Oracle plans to just use its own matching engine from the Oracle Customer Hub in Oracle Universal Content Management – ‘that would be a step backwards in my opinion,’ he writes.”

The Austin Chronicle: Drug Trafficking Gets Intense?

“But both FBI Agent Royce Curtain and the DPS’ Tom Ruocco said that communication among law enforcement agencies in the area is good – and, said Ruocco, the addition of a local Austin Regional Intelligence Center (a.k.a. a ‘fusion center‘) would be an asset to getting information needed to detect if there is an increase in local drug trafficking activity. Getting involved in the fusion center is ‘proactive on the city’s part,’ said Ruocco. When there are trends ‘coming forward’ the city will be in a ‘better position to react.’”

Insurance Journal: Kentucky Coal Mine Operator Charged with Workers’ Compensation Fraud

“The indictment alleged that between May 2004 and May 2005, Allen underreported monthly payroll and the number of miners working for her to Kentucky Employers Mutual Insurance. She did this by creating a sham trucking company and placing many of her mining employees on that payroll.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Breaking through an open door

“Why are some people always reminding us that this and that must be seen in a business context? Of course everything we do in our professional life within data quality, master data management, business intelligence and so on must be seen in a business context.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Unobtrusive Measures and Identity Resolution

“For decades, researchers in the social sciences have used “unobtrusive measures” as defined originally in a 1966 book by Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, and Sechrest. The idea is to collect and analyze data without disturbing the subjects of the study. For example, instead of surveying subjects to find out how many candy bars they eat each day, the subjects’ garbage is searched and the number of candy wrappers is tallied.”

Information Management: TIBCO Software Acquires Netrics

“Gartner Research VP Andrew White highlighted the continued frenzy of acquisitions in the master data management space in a blog on the latest acquisition. ‘… this new acquisition highlights the dwindling set of data quality tools for master data management (and other interested) vendors to partner with, and/or acquire,’ White wrote. ‘The acquisition seems logical, and good, for packaged MDM (TIBCO offers one) though; but as the music dies down, who will be left standing without a partner…’”

Workers’ Comp Kit Blog: Business Owners and Secretary Facing Prison For Lying to Wiggle Out of High Premiums

“The Ventura County District Attorney’s office recently arraigned the owners, along with the company’s secretary, on five felony counts of insurance premium fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. According to authorities, the three lied to their insurer to save an estimated $500,000, making it appear their employees were more experienced than they actually were.”

SmartDataCollective: MDM Can Challenge Traditional Development Paradigms

“Dealing with imperfect data has traditionally been unacceptable because it slowed down processing; ignoring it or returning an error was a best practice. The difference about MDM development is the focus on data content (and value-based) processing.  The whole purpose MDM is to deal with all data, including the unacceptable stuff. It assumes that the data is good enough.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Forrester Blog: TIBCO jumps onto MDM M&A train with acquisition of data matching vendor Netrics

[Rob Karel] “Netrics seemed the most likely target for Oracle to replace Identity Systems with its small footprint and relatively low acquisition cost, but now with Netrics off the market, Oracle should consider other matching vendors such as S3 Matching Technologies, Syslore or identity resolution/matching vendor Infoglide Software.”

msnbc: What is TSA’s Secure Flight Program?

“Secure Flight launched in August, is currently in a phase-in stage, and is intended to be fully in place by November 2010 for all flights leaving from and/or arriving in the U.S. Essentially, the airlines and booking engines will collect your full name, gender and birth date when you book your flight and send that info to the TSA, which will then compare the information against the no-fly list. The name you give when you book must synch up with your full name as shown on the government-issued ID you use when checking in for your flight.”

Michael Power: Can Governments Force Patient Data into EHRs?

“As a brief and somewhat simplistic aside, ‘electronic health record’ is a term often incorrectly used to describe both EHRs and EMRs. There is a distinction between the two and it is an important one. Hospitals and physicians use EMRs. EMRs, along with other databases, are expected to feed into a longitudinal ‘virtual’ patient record which is to be accessible across providers and institutions and which is properly referred to as the EHR.”

Security Management: Terror Threat Tracking System Shares Thousands of Tips from Locals, FBI Says

“The eGuardian system is one of the core technological elements of the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) established by congressional mandate in response to the intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 attacks. In a typical scenario, a law enforcement agency will either generate its own SAR or field one from the public.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Garbage In, Garbage Out? Not Necessarily.

“One of the oldest phrases in computer science seems to still be in vogue. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ (GIGO) is a term coined during the early days of the computing industry. It pointed out that the value of computer systems of the day were entirely dependent upon their input data. No amount of processing power could produce a right answer from bad data. Fast forward many decades…”

Formtek: Technology: Data Consistency via Master Data Management

“The concept of MDM is a good one, and many companies have piloted MDM projects over the last few years.  Now research firm Baseline Consulting  says that many companies are beginning to move beyond their MDM pilot systems.  Baseline Consulting co-founder Jill Dyche said that ‘the fact that data quality, data governance, and data enrichment processes may accompany an MDM initiative make it all the more attractive as an enterprise solution.’”

HSToday: DHS Intelligence Needs More Oversight

“The success of the fusion center program,” said the report, “ is dependent on the infrastructure that enables state and local fusion centers to have access to each other’s information as well as to the appropriate federal databases. The fusion center program and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Report Initiative (NSI) rely on the concept of shared space architecture, where the fusion centers replicate data from their systems to an external server under their control, making the decision on what to share totally under their control.”

HealthITExchange: EHR implementation a foregone conclusion, ONC says

“No matter how the rules shake out, EHR implementation in the United States is a foregone conclusion, Blumenthal said. He sees the skills of collecting, using, searching and sharing health data electronically becoming part of the assumed professional skill set for health care providers, just as using a stethoscope is now. In the next five to 10 years, hospitals will use their robust EHR systems to recruit physicians; solo physicians who succeed in implementing EHR will sell their practices more easily when the time comes, but solo physicians still using paper will not be able to sell their practices at all.”

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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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[Post from Infoglide] Recession Driving Insurance Fraud

“A recent post on McClatchy’s blog attributes growing insurance fraud to the recession: A recent survey of 37 state insurance-fraud bureaus by the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud found that the recession “appears to have had a significant impact on the incidence of fraud” last year. On average, the bureaus reported increases in case referrals and new investigations in all 15 categories of fraud the survey covers.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: What is Data Quality anyway?

“If we look at what data quality tools today actually do, they in fact mostly support you with automation of data profiling and data matching, which is probably only some of the data quality challenges you have.”

Voice of America: Murder of US Consulate Workers in Mexico Signals New Phase in Violence

“Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical intelligence for Austin, Texas-based analysis firm Stratfor, says the killings might have been related to a recently announced U.S. plan to increase cooperation with Mexican law enforcement agencies. ‘We believe that it is likely related to a decision last month to start working more closely with the Mexican government by the Americans,” said Scott Stewart. “They were going to put some personnel into a joint fusion center in Juarez.’”

Coalition Against Insurance Fraud: False claims act for Maryland

“The Coalition issued a statement supporting the bill, saying it would serve as a deterrent and a powerful incentive for medical providers to have strong compliance programs and to “play by the rules.” False claims acts help detect fraudulent schemes that otherwise might not ever be known because they allow insiders to blow the whistle and initiate civil actions.”

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