Background

I own a small company that specializes in obtaining information from public and proprietary sources.  We then take this information and try to make it easier for the average user to browse and work with.  For this service, subscribers pay a small monthly fee.  Most of the information we work with is is related to Medicare and Medicaid financial data.

We have obtained the information we have requested from most of the U.S. states with very few problems arising.  We try to make it as easy as possible for the state agencies and offload most of the processing and parsing of the data to our developers.  The agencies usually comply within a week or two and send everything we asked for on a CD, or if they are really good they’ll send it through an online file transfer service.  Throughout all of these transactions, the worst thing that’s happened is a confused employee that wasn’t sure if they had the requested data.  That is, until contacting the Alabama Medicaid Agency.

The request for data from Alabama began as they have for all the other states.  As with all the other states, it’s unusually difficult to find the right person to talk to in order to get the data you want.  Usually after 10-15 minutes of referrals or continuous promises to have someone call you back, you finally find the right person.  After finding the right person, you still have to ask for the data the way they are accustomed to referring to it, which of course I don’t know initially. I finally found the person in charge of nursing home auditing, Keith Boswell, who was also in charge of the data I wanted to request.  This of course would be the beginning of a 3-4 month ordeal that is still unresolved and I believe there have been many violations of the Alabama Open Records Act in the Alabama Code throughout this entire period.

I’m going to now provide as much detail as possible about these 3-4 months, from which it should be obvious that there has been a violation of Alabama law as well as plenty of government inefficiency and waste.

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The content of my main web application, Myhealthcaresource, will contain more than 15000 detailed financial reports for nursing facilities at its future peak.  Each of these reports contains textual information as well as monetary values.  It might list administrator names, employee names/salaries, owners, products or services purchased.  I wanted to have all of this information searchable on Google, without Google caching the page.  I also wanted to let users who came from Google as a result of searching for this information see it without having to log in, but only the page that they found through Google search. (more…)

I’ve decided it will be good for me if I can sit down once a week and try to write about a problem I had to solve that week, either in my daily life or working on a project.

The biggest problem for this week was actually making myself sit down and write something on here.  I don’t think that would be very interesting to readers or my future self so I’ll fore go the discussion of that.

I think the first thing I should do is explain my background.  I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Carolina (USC) working in the ARENA for Research on Emerging Networks and Applications (ARENA) lab.  Here I focus on developing new wireless network protocols in an endless quest to publish papers.  I have been with Dr. Srihari Nelakuditi since about 2004, when he hired me as an undergraduate researcher.  We have presented multiple papers together.  One was presented at MobiCom and can be found in the Mobile Computer Communications Review (MCCR), it is on security in Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANETs).  Another notable paper was presented at the WiMesh workshop 2008 at SECON, it is not yet available online and focused on bit-rate selection in oppotunistic routing.  The second paper was also the focus of my Master’s Thesis.

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