The U.S. Army Public Health Center (USAPHC) manages the full spectrum of activities and programs related to health promotion, wellness, behavioral health, and the prevention of disease, injury, and disability of Soldiers and military retirees, their Families, and Department of the Army civilian employees. ESC supports USAPHC across five (5) portfolios: Army Health Promotion and Wellness, Clinical Public Health & Epidemiology, Public Health Information, Health Risk Management, and Basic and Applied Research. ESC provides:

• Program Managers/Project Officers/Trainers to support Health Promotion and Wellness Operations outreach activities
• Statisticians/Applied Economists for program/project evaluation, applied research, statistical and data analysis support
• Financial and Management Analysts for budgetary support

As part of this effort, ESC devised and implemented health promotion strategies and oversight of Army Health Promotion Operations.  ESC provided technical assistance and training (TA/T), and program management support for health promotion strategies in support of Army Health Promotion and Wellness (HPW) and Ready and resilient (R2) operations.  In this role, we helped develop policy guidance relating to health risk, behavioral health strategies, and executed outreach strategies and programs to Soldiers and military retirees, their Families, and Department of the Army civilian employees.

For more information or if you would like to become a part of public and behavioral health research and analysis activities, contact careers@edmondsci.com

November 2016, San Diego — Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) researchers presented their latest findings to the scientific community, and shared experiences with their colleagues at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in San Diego.  SfN’s goal is to advance the shared understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the purpose of the annual SfN meeting is to share research; learn new techniques, theories, and other efforts that could be applied to ESC supported research in neurodegenerative disorders and injury, and integrative physiology and behavior.  ESC supported research was presented during on the topics of “Age-dependent susceptibility to seizure and neuronal loss” and “Anticonvulsant, antiepileptic and neuroprotective effects of ketamine, valproate and midazolam polytherapy”.  The first topic addresses the increased susceptibility of the aged population (65 years and older) to status epilepticus (SE) and recurrent seizure activity, as well as the neuropathological underpinnings of this increased vulnerability.  ESC research reported on the effects of toxic exposure in adult and aged populations on seizure activity and neuronal loss, and related it to the loss of hippocampal interneurons and reduced inhibition which may lead to increased susceptibility to the development of seizures in an aged population.  The second topic related to researching better treatments against pharmaco-resistant seizures using combinations of drugs aimed at reversing the effects of maladaptive receptor trafficking.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the research was performed under contract to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense (USAMRICD) to reduce the extensive neuropathology and long-term performance deficits of uncontrolled seizures as a result of exposure to toxic Chemical Warfare Nerve Agents (CWNAs).  However, the research also has direct relevance to other aged-related medical research areas that focus on neuronal loss and neurotoxicity due to natural and artificial causes.

“Hello. This is John from the ride service. Which hospital is your destination and what is your pickup location.”

These were the words which greeted every caller during the severe winter storm afflicting Northern Virginia from January 22-24, 2016 which dumped three feet of snow in 36 hours.  The weather forced Emergency Room and other hospital staff to remain at the hospital until relief shifts could arrive, and stranded discharged patients who arrived by ambulance since no taxis or ride services were able to operate.

During the height of the storm, which during Saturday afternoon and evening delivered 35 mph winds and 1-2 inches of snow per hour, and for the following days until traditional ride services could operate on the roads, Edmond Scientific provided snow emergency ride services to hospital staff and patients.  Edmond Scientific ride services supported INOVA Emergency Access in Fairfax and the Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center Complex, transporting patients home and hospital staff to and from their homes, often which were on unplowed streets.  In all, the Edmond Scientific driver logged more than 500 miles averaging about 1.5 hours per trip through the storm, and provided services from 5:30 AM through 12 PM for nearly three days.

Little did any of the riders know that the driver was none other than Edmond Scientific President and CEO John Pitale, and his trusty sidekick and son Ivan (needed for help in digging the ruggedized Jeep out when it was inevitably stuck) taking a break from running the company and leaving the warmth of home and family to provide this needed service.

As identity management and authorization technologies evolve, organizations struggle to determine how to modernize and remain interoperable within their business units or across divisions. Implementing or modernizing to newer security protocols and technologies such as SAML, OAuth, OpenID from legacy technologies can render authentication and authorization systems incompatible, and make it difficult to enforce policies uniformly. Migrating to uniform enterprise identity and access management technologies can be disruptive and complex.

Edmond Scientific has developed a complete and comprehensive Identity Management and Authorization solution that can support both legacy and modern applications, and provide a single service for all identity and access management needs across the enterprise. At the core of this resides Edmond’s patented Hybrid Authorization Control System (H-ACS) which integrates and harmonizes, in a single solution, a complete set of identity and authorization management technologies including OAuth, OpenID Connect, User-Managed Authorization (UMA), XACML, and SAML together with the interconnecting protocols and required client-side connectors. This solution enables a hybrid identity and authorization ecosystem in which both traditional and modern services can coexist and interact.  For cross-domain information exchange and interoperability, it enables a continuous security fabric utilizing identity management and authentication mechanisms in any protocol, without the need to convert legacy systems or create joint user directories.

Further information on related Edmond Scientific services may be found in NextGen Authorization Services.

Falls Church, Virginia

Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) was awarded a contract to support the Solution Delivery Division (SDD) Program Executive Office (PEO) at the Defense Health Agency (DHA) to manage a comprehensive Quality System and Business Process Improvement (BPI) effort.  SDD manages the acquisition, delivery, integration, and sustainment of information technology products and solutions throughout the Military Health System to include clinical, resource management, logistics, and health information systems.

ESC manages all Quality Assurance/Process Improvement processes by providing Government Program and Product Managers with a quality management approach that ensures repeatable processes, identifies opportunities for improvement, and provides a structured and measurable approach from planning through operations.  ESC efforts also include conducting a comprehensive Risk Management program to include identifying, capturing, and providing mitigation plans for major program and contract risks; a Measurement and Analysis (M&A) and Earned Value Management (EVM) program to include tracking and reporting of product and organization progress, trends, problems, and costs; and an Integration Management effort that includes schedule management and coordination across the more than thirty independent and cross-dependent systems.

ESC was selected based upon our strength in applying our experience and ability to bring innovation to Quality Assurance (QA) and Process/Performance Improvement programs.  By leveraging our experience implementing and managing QA, CMMI and ISO 9001/20000 programs along with a technical staff driven by a service-oriented philosophy, we are able to provide benefit through long-term, sustained improvements to organizational performance.  For SDD, ESC maintains process conformance and quality measurement across the three tiers of organization, product, and program level reporting and includes risk and schedule management to ensure work product completion throughout the organization.  ESC manages and executes quality processes and measurement across various functional areas to include:

• Business Infrastructure
• Acquisition Management
• Project Management
• Requirements Management and Development
• Acquisition
• Test and Evaluation
• Production and Agile Development
• Configuration Management
• Risk and Schedule Management
• Information Assurance
• Earned Value Measurement, Audit and Analysis
• Engineering
• Training

Chantilly, Virginia                                                                                                                        October, 2015

Highly performing organizations focus on improving outcomes and results with the resources on hand, and strategic communications is a key feature in the ability to align actions with policies and plans, engage with stakeholders and audiences to promote understanding and coordination, and demonstrate value by highlighting real performance and results.  Strategic communications doesn’t just happen.  It happens because plans are made to improve performance, goals and success metrics are determined, stakeholders for coordination and success are engaged, target audiences are identified, synchronized messages that align to goals are developed, and appropriate communications channels are efficiently used to deliver a clear and consistent message.

This is especially true for government agencies in transformation.  The reorganization of military health organizations into the Defense Health Agency (DHA) and the consolidation of the Defense Health Clinical Systems (DHCS) and Defense Health Services Systems (DHSS) into the Solutions Delivery Division (SDD) created great challenges in planning, defining and measuring success, maintaining intra-agency and interagency coordination, and communicating intentions and actions to users and system stakeholders.  Strategic communications is essential to facilitating change management associated with major Agency and Division initiatives.

Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) was selected to provide leadership and management of SDD’s strategic communications and outreach efforts.  Efforts focus on communicating the Division’s strategic message to include policies and plans; synchronizing information from various stakeholders and operational activities; communicating system- or product-specific information to promote user awareness and engagement; and demonstrating value and effective resource management by communicating performance improvements and savings to sponsors and customers.  All this is powered by web analytic tools to capture macro and micro performance metrics and activity, and a dedicated Metrics and Analysis (M&A) effort to capture Agency performance and process metrics as part of an Edmond Scientific Quality System and Business Process Improvement (BPI) effort.

The result is a coordinated business transformation that maintains alignment with goals and promotes awareness and understanding throughout the organization.  Success is achieved through comprehensive communications planning and execution by expert staff that is able to optimize media and communications channels with cost-effective tools, techniques, and strategies to deliver a customized, coherent message through a variety of artifacts.  Edmond Scientific’s benefit is that we provide a cost-effective solution and experienced staff to help demonstrate value, highlight success, communicate and coordinate information flow, and facilitate the continued ability to effectively utilize resources to improve performance and delivery.

Chantilly, Virginia                                                                                                                        October 2015

The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense (USAMRICD) is a world leader in the discovery and development of medical products, treatment protocols, and solutions against chemical poisoning and threats through research and development.   As the only remaining U.S. facility performing live agent research into the exposure and effects of chemical warfare agents (CWAs), USAMRICD is a key component of our national deterrent and tactical defensive capabilities.  Whether it is developing accurate markers and sensitive methods of detecting exposure, evaluating the use of human recombinant PON1 (rePON1) to increase survival to exposure, or investigating adaptive biological responses as potential therapeutic targets to reduce the toxic effects of exposure, USAMRICD research and efforts are crucial not just to the warfighter, but to the American people.

Advancing treatment and countermeasures against chemical agents such as VX, GD, GB, sulfur mustard (HD), other organophosphates, and commercial compounds such as ammonia requires a range of very specific skills and specialties. Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) provides researchers in biology, molecular biology, pharmacology, neuroscience, biochemistry, physiology, and immunology as well as laboratory support staff to help advance USAMRICD’s military mission and the nation’s civil defense preparedness. Among other areas, ESC supports current research in the evaluation of anticholinergic and antiglutamatergic ligands, medical countermeasures to attenuate neuropathological and behavioral consequences, the use of cannabinoids as adjunct to standard therapy, and assessments of treatment strategies for accidental inhalation of industrial chemicals such as ammonia.  In addition to advancing protection of U.S. Military Forces and civil defense, some of the research has dual-use in that it is also relevant to treatment of chronic pain, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer’s.

Helping Veterans make Appointments for VA Outpatient Ambulatory Care by Creating Systems that are Compatible with Open Source VistA

                                                             VETERANS DAY

In 2012, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced a prize contest under the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act.  The purpose of the contest was to encourage development of systems that help Veterans schedule appointments to receive outpatient and ambulatory care from the VHA.

The contest was opened up to the Health Information Technology (HIT) industry, effectively encouraging a collaborative approach with industry and VA, using open standards in an open-community development initiative.  The benefits resulting from the VA casting a wide-net across industry were enormous and resulted in creating an open-source solution.  As an additional outcome of the contest, the VA sought to obtain information to reduce the risks inherent in procurement and deployment of a replacement Medical Scheduling Platform (MSP).

The VA uses MSP, a component in its VistA electronic health record (EHR) system, to bring patients, clinicians and other resources together so health care can be delivered.  The MSP also captures data that allows VA to measure, manage and improve access to care, quality of care, operating efficiency and operating and capital resources.  VA intended to replace the current MSP with a standards-based, modular, extensible and scalable, certified as compliant and fully interoperable with the production version of VistA now held by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA).  The replacement product will deliver privacy, security, data integrity, patient accessibility, interoperability and other services required by federal law, regulations and VA policy.

VA anticipates that compatibility with Open Source VistA will be among the requirements in any subsequent procurement of a replacement for the MSP.  Demonstration of open source compatibility in this contest was taken into consideration in the rating of proposals in any subsequent procurement.

One of the contest winners, the HP team’s “Open-community” solution included team member, Edmond Scientific Company.   Referring to their work on the  award-winning HP team, an Edmond spokesperson said, “Edmond contributed the rapid development of an integration architecture based on industry standards which was supported by open source implementations.  This in turn could be used for the pilot. The integration architecture defined the collaboration between the subsystem teams to achieve the user stories.  Our submission was focused on VA’s long-term need and less so on the contest criteria, but explored some of the most difficult challenges.”

The prize money from this contest have been donated to the following Veterans Service Organization (VSO): Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), Disabled American Veterans Association, Fischer House and Paralyzed Veterans of America.

ABOUT EDMOND SCIENTIFIC COMPANY

Edmond Scientific Company (www.edmondsci.com ) is a professional services firm that creates innovative business solutions in the realm of health data sharing consent and privacy policy interoperability, advancing the Cross-Enterprise Security and Privacy Authorization (XSPA) standard for health information access.  As a leader in the management, development and implementation of enterprise data security and privacy, ESC technology solutions focus on patient authorized release architecture and modeling, and electronic patient consent authorization.  Our engineers have drafted the Authorization Framework standards for data transfer among Health Information Exchanges, to provide secure, interoperable solutions in the federal and commercial markets.

Helping the Department of Veterans Affairs Implement a Cost-Effective, Open-Source Appointment Scheduling Application that is Interoperable with Legacy Enterprise Applications and Data

November 11, 2013                                          VETERANS DAY

In 2013, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced a prize contest under the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act to encourage development of systems that help Veterans schedule appointments to receive outpatient and ambulatory care from the VHA.  The contest was opened up to the Health Information Technology (HIT) industry, effectively encouraging a collaborative approach with industry and VA, using open standards in an open-community development initiative.  The benefits resulting from the VA casting a wide-net across industry were enormous and resulted in creating an open-source solution.  As an additional outcome of the contest, the VA sought to obtain information to reduce the risks inherent in procurement and deployment of a replacement Medical Scheduling Platform (MSP).

The VA uses MSP, a component in its VistA electronic health record (EHR) system, to bring patients, clinicians and other resources together so health care can be delivered.  The MSP also captures data that allows VA to measure, manage and improve access to care, quality of care, operating efficiency and operating and capital resources.  The VA intended to replace the current MSP with a standards-based, modular, extensible, scalable, and certified as compliant with the production version of VistA, now held by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA).  The replacement product will deliver privacy, security, data integrity, patient accessibility, interoperability and other services required by federal law, regulations and VA policy.

As a key member of the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Open Source Community Team Submission, Edmond Scientific provided the architecture and integration support between VistA and open source scheduling applications.  This included enhancements to legacy VistA Scheduling through integration with other VistA packages requiring support, thereby reducing implementation risks.  The solution contained a scheduling Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to establish an authoritative service for cross-facility scheduling complexity, optimization and with enterprise considerations taken into account,  Integration to Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) and Open Source Software (OSS) products provided the functionality, such as a scheduling engine and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).  The open source business rules engine provides an adaptive, supportive, and flexible approach for managing complexity of business logic and workflow associated with medical appointment scheduling.   The solution also included open Application Programming Interfaces (API) for the SOA services to minimize the impact of cross-package dependencies within and beyond VistA, eliminating direct dependencies.

VA anticipates that compatibility with Open Source VistA will be among the requirements in any subsequent procurement of a replacement for the MSP.  Demonstration of open source compatibility in this contest was taken into consideration in the rating of proposals in any subsequent procurement.

Edmond’s Practice Director Tony Mallia states of his work on the award-winning contest submission “We contributed the rapid development of an integration architecture based on industry standards which was supported by open source implementations.  This in turn could be used for the pilot. The integration architecture defined the collaboration between the subsystem teams to achieve the user stories.  Our submission was focused on VA’s long-term need and less so on the contest criteria, but explored some of the most difficult challenges.”

On Veterans Day, November 11^th, 2013, Edmond Scientific President and CEO John Pitale, himself a Desert Storm combat veteran, will participate in the activities surrounding the HP Team donation.  The $520,000 in prize money from this contest is being fully donated to the following Veterans Service Organization (VSO):  $350,000 to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), $150,000 to the Disabled American Veterans (DAV) Association, and $10,000 each to both Fischer House and the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).

ABOUT EDMOND SCIENTIFIC COMPANY

Edmond Scientific Company (www.edmondsci.com ) is an engineering and professional services company that delivers cost-effective solutions designed to address the unique information protection and information sharing needs of our Healthcare, Public Sector and Commercial sector clients.  Edmond brings to your organization the architectural governance, integration engineering, application development, and expertise needed to provide secure, interoperable information solutions.

As a leading researcher and validator of security and information standards in information exchange, we also help organizations navigate and effectively implement interoperable solutions to provide secure information access that bridges incompatible protocols and standards, thus avoiding the costly impact of compliance and non-interoperability on your application development and business performance.