Conmergence

St. Joseph Medical Center (Houston) and MedConcierge to Demonstrate Telemedicine Solutions at FTTH Council Conference

Top Houston Hospital Selects MedConcierge to Offer Telemedicine to Corporations and Master Planned Communities

September 8, 2009 (Sarasota, FL & Houston, TX) - St. Joseph Medical Center, the largest, Level 3 trauma hospital in downtown Houston, has selected MedConcierge to provide its advanced telemedicine solution to leading communities and corporations. Both parties will demonstrate the user experience and benefits of telemedicine during the upcoming 2009 FTTH Conference & Expo taking place at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, September 27th through October 1st.

"We are very excited to demonstrate the MedConcierge at St. Joseph Medical Center service to local community developers and corporate executives at the upcoming Fiber to the Home Conference," states St. Joseph chief executive officer Phillip D. Robinson, "Telemedicine will clearly be at the center of healthcare delivery moving forward and leveraging the technological advantages of the MedConcierge service over fiber-optic communications will help us extend patient services, generate additional revenue and save costs."

"St. Joseph is a leader in the Houston area, and we are thrilled to play a role in helping them deliver health and wellness services to residents of FTTH communities in and around the Houston metropolitan area," says MedConcierge director Rob Scheschareg. "Telemedicine offers competitive and financial benefits in a cost-effective fashion that is critical in today's market environment. We look forward to meeting service providers and developers at the FTTH Conference & Expo who want to take advantage of the billions being spent by consumers and the government in the next 30 months on home-based telemedicine."

Substantial news coverage, increasing consumer interest and adoption, and the allocation of billions of dollars in Federal stimulus funds specifically for broadband and healthcare information technology have placed telemedicine at the forefront of applications that benefit from fiber to the home networks.

"Fiber to the home provides benefits to consumers and employers that truly improve the quality of life. From our own industry research to that of our members and market followers, it is becoming increasingly evident that consumers want the benefits of improved healthcare services and access to doctors that services like MedConcierge and healthcare providers like St. Joseph can provide," states Joe Savage, president of the FTTH Council. "Telemedicine is a prime example of the type of applications that will be on display at our upcoming conference demonstrating the power of fiber".

To showcase the user experience, benefits and implementation of telemedicine services, MedConcierge and St. Joseph Medical Center will be hosting a number of activities at the upcoming 2009 FTTH Conference & Expo.  These include:

Corporate VIP Demonstration & Reception, Tuesday, September 29th.  For more information call the Corporate Health Connection at St. Joseph Medical Center at (713) 756-8600. 

MedConcierge Booth in the Fiber Zone, located on the show floor during exhibit hours. 

Phillip D. Robinson, CEO, St. Joseph Medical Center will be discussing telemedicine over FTTH networks as part of the Closing Keynote presentation Wednesday, September 30th at 2:00 pm.

For information about these events, visit the conference website at http://www.ftthconference.com.

About St. Joseph Medical Center

St. Joseph Medical Center, downtown Houston's only general acute care hospital, partners with Houston physicians to provide comprehensive health care to all.  As Houston's first hospital, St. Joseph Medical Center provides services for outpatients as well as inpatients, with a full continuum of care in surgery, cancer care, emergency care, Women's services, cardiovascular services, wound care, rehab, sports medicine, Corporate Health Connection and more. For more information on St. Joseph Medical Center, please visit http://www.sjmctx.com or call 713.757.1000.

About MedConcierge, LLC

MedConcierge is the leading provider of telemedicine solutions for community developers and operators, broadband service providers, healthcare providers, and municipalities, that deliver personal, concierge healthcare services to consumers at home, at work and while traveling. Utilizing our award-winning, patent-pending technology, MedConcierge provides unparalleled private and secure access to certified doctors, specialists and content. MedConcierge offerings range from real-time, live videoconference consultations, on demand, 24/7 with leading doctors, specialists, psychiatrists and wellness experts, to educational content, health status monitoring and dynamic electronic medical records - all accessible from the comfort, privacy and convenience of homes and facilities. For more information, visit http://www.medconcierge.com.

UPDATE: No National (STEM) Broadband Policy: Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

"FTTH: Small Cities Are Not Waiting", by Jeff Griffin, Senior Editor, Underground Construction, June 2008

The telecommunications giants are spending millions of dollars touting bundled service packages, with heavy emphasis on “high-speed” broadband internet connections that includes video programming along with local and long-distance telephone services.

# # # #

<ed.note>The Fiber-to-the-Home Council reports in the FTTH Connection newsletter on: "H. Res. 1292, a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives calling for universal availability of next-generation broadband networks with transmission speeds of 100 megabits per second by 2015."

JULY 4th DOUBLE TAXATION UPDATE: It occurs to me that this effort only truly makes geekonomic sense if they also pass The Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act so that New York State will stop discouraging interstate results-only collaborative work environments with their double taxation of out-of-state telecommuters policy.</ed.note>

# # # #

<ed.note>What folks just don't seem to get is that the network is the killer app - neither did folks know how they would use electricity until it was built out. Cloud, Grid, Utility computing possibilities are limited by the geo-locked mindset (think anti-ROWE, Sludge) which doesn't grasp a global market place can be competed in from anywhere on the grid and no where off of it -- and misses peer-to-peer possibilities entirely. We need, as a nation, to ask "which problems can't be better addressed by throwing more CPUs-in-parallel at them?"</ed.note>

See this, that, and the other. More. Morer. Even morer.

The National Alliance For Health Information Technology Calls for Creation of Voluntary Unique Patient Identifiers for Exchanging Electronic Health Records

“One of the biggest obstacles to progress in developing an interoperable national health information network remains reaching agreement on how to correctly match medical information to patients while guarding their privacy,” says Scott Wallace, the Alliance’s president and CEO. “It is time to come to consensus on this issue so we can move forward on a system that will help transform healthcare in America.”

Led by its Technology Leadership and Policy Committees, the Alliance has concluded that the current statistical process for matching patients to their records based on such attributes as name, address and birth date is too unreliable. The Alliance has been focusing on the issue of patient identification for three years, including holding forums, reviewing research and gathering input from a range of experts, including some of its members.

“Outside of carefully controlled pilots, accuracy for the current process is roughly 90 percent, based on our collective experience and industry estimates,” says Tom Doyle, Vice President and Chief Architect for HCA and a member of the Alliance’s Technology Leadership Committee. “That margin of error will only widen as it is applied to ever-larger populations.”

A system of unique identifiers would not only make medical information much more complete and accurate but more private and secure. An identifier’s single-use status, protected in a closed loop among participating providers and patients, reveals nothing about the person—it has no street value. That is in stark contrast to the existing process-of-elimination formula, which becomes more accurate as more types of information about a person are added but simultaneously increases the risk of identity theft.

Voluntary unique identifiers also put control in the hands of the patients. “We believe it is in the best interests of consumers to be able to collect, track and manage their personal information,” says Michael Kappel, Senior Vice President, Government Strategy and Relations for McKesson Provider Technologies, and Chair of the Alliance’s Policy Committee. “Unique identifiers can help make this effort more comprehensive and reliable while allowing people to decide who else has access to their health records without worrying about incomplete information or identification mix-ups.”

As part of the consensus-building process, the Alliance is soliciting input and comments on unique patient identifiers on its web site at www.nahit.org .

About the Alliance
The National Alliance for Health Information Technology is a diverse partnership of senior executives from all healthcare sectors working to advance the adoption of clinical information technology systems to achieve measurable improvements in patient safety, quality of care and operating performance. The Alliance collaborates with healthcare and government leaders to influence healthcare decision-makers to act effectively in creating an efficient, safe, unified, and inclusive health system possible. Since its founding in 2002, the Chicago-based Alliance has helped forge consensus and accelerate progress on such important initiatives as developing an industry-endorsed interoperability definition, creating a public directory of health IT standards and authoring Rules of Engagement: A proven path for instilling, and then installing a CPOE approach that works. The Alliance is a co-founder of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and its CEO chaired the Commission on Systemic Interoperability (CSI). More information about the Alliance is available at www.nahit.org .

Contact:
Lois Padovani
Padovani Communications
630-241-1430
l.padovani@comcast.net

China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People

August 12, 2007 By KEITH BRADSHER, nytimes.com

...Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

...The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

...“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

CLTV26: EuroPython 2007 - Simon Willison about OpenID (Keynote)

here. Christian Scholz posted the following:

Simon Willison gave this year’s first keynote at the EuroPython 2007 in Vilnius, Lithuania. He did not talk that much about Python this time but instead about OpenID and how it might change how we use the web in the future. He was also encouraging esp. framework developers to include OpenID support in their frameworks (as a sidenote, Plone 3 will ship with OpenID support and just got the bounty from the OpenID foundation).

Voice: The New Fingerprint?

Jun 1, 2007 By David Jastrow, speechtechmag.onlineinc.com

Prevailing security methods used to protect against identity theft are losing ground to fraudsters. In fact, the total cost of identity fraud in the United States in 2006 reached $56.6 billion, up 6.4 percent from $53.2 billion three years earlier, according to the 2006 Identity Fraud Survey Report from Javelin Strategy and the Better Business Bureau. What’s more, mean resolution time for these cases has risen to 40 hours and costs $6,383 per person, up from 33 hours and $5,249 per person three years ago, according to the same report.
 
The overwhelming damage to organizations forced the government to step in. New laws designed to protect people from identify theft, such as the Bank Secrecy Act, are requiring higher levels of user authentication for financial transactions.

Using OpenID

Justen Stepka, The ServerSide.com

What is OpenID?
OpenID is an open, decentralized, open-source framework for user-centric digital identity.

Think about all the accounts you have online: blogs, wikis, to-do lists, photo galleries. The list is endless. Even simple tasks such as leaving comments on someone else's blog may require you to register an account with that particular blogging system. This leaves you, as an end user, to set up and manage numerous accounts on each of these sites. With OpenID, rather than managing all these disparate accounts individually, users can manage their identity in one place via an authentication server.

Contactless Cards 2007 June 25th & 26th, London

SMi's Contactless Cards Conference will bring together leading industry players to discuss the latest opportunities and challenges within the market focusing on advanced transport systems, operator networks, payment applications, passports and IDs.

After the two-day event Consult Hyperion will also be holding a half-day interactive workshop - ?1+1 = 3? Contactless + Mobile = Something Special which will look at the question: Is the hype around NFC and mobile phones justified? The workshop will attempt to answer this question based on practical experiences developing NFC applications for clients in the finance, transport, telecommunications and technology sectors, while simultaneously acting as a mobile/NFC boot camp. For more information and to download the full conference programme visit:
www.smi-online.co.uk/2007contactlesscards11.asp

Companies already attending include:

Advanta National Bank USA, Alliance & Leicester, Bankalararasi Kart Merkezi, Bayern Card Services, DnB NOR, EDS, Elavon Merchant Services, ESP Systex, Euromonitor International, GMPTE, Komercní banka, MasterCard Worldwide, Tatra Banka AS, Thales Telecom Services, Trans Link Systems B.V... and many more

Places are limited so register now to secure your place. Smart Card Alliance members receive 20% discount.

To register your place contact Marta Szymaniak on tel: +44 (0) 207 827 6180or email: mszymaniak@smi-online.co.uk

Speakers include:

Dr Toni Merschen, Group Head, Chip, MasterCard Worldwide

Randy Vanderhoof, Executive Director, Smart Card Alliance

Paul Marsh, Director, Cards and Fraud Control, APACS

Shashi Verma, Director of Oyster Card, Transport for London

Brian Byrne, Chair of the Board of Managers and Vice President, EMVCo

Guido Mangiagalli, Head of New Channels, Visa Europe

Greg Garback, Executive Officer, Division of Finance, Washington (DC) Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA)

Dominic Peachey, Policy Adviser, Financial Services Authority

Thomas Martin, Senior Product Manager, Debit Cards, Lloyds TSB Group

James Parsons, Vice President, EMEA Cards Product Development, JPMorgan Chase

The REAL[Health] ID Media War

here. And it's sister war here. Meanwhile, in the UK [2].

Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative and secure contactless smart card technology

The Smart Card Alliance Passport Card Final Response