On Monday, March 4, Arrowhead Regional Medical Center (ARMC) in San Bernardino, California was one of two local medical centers to participate in a mass casualty drill.
The objective of the drill for ARMC was to test the hospital’s ability to respond effectively to a surge of patients resulting from a mass casualty incident. Throughout the exercise, ARMC staff demonstrated their proficiency in triage, patient care, communication and coordination of resources. The drill also provided an opportunity for staff to practice protocols for receiving patients, managing supplies and implementing surge capacity plans.
At least 14 people were dead and another 17 injured in a shooting Wednesday in San Bernardino, California, when gunmen who were heavily armed and “on a mission” opened fire during a function at a center for people with developmental disabilities, police said.
Police believe two alleged shooters — a county employee and a woman with whom he was in a relationship opened fire around 11 a.m. at the Inland Regional Center. They were armed with assault weapons and “prepared to do what they did as if they were on a mission,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said….
Five people were taken to the nearby Loma Linda University Medical Center, two of which were critical but stable, two of which were fair and the one who was still being assessed, according to a hospital spokeswoman. Six other people are being treated at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, though their conditions are unknown.
Although it wasn’t mentioned in San Bernardino County’s 2024 description of the drill, I’m sure some participants remembered what happened nine years ago.
The Hippocratic Oath imposes duties on medical professionals, including this one:
I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.
As 1NURSE.COM notes, forensic nursing is multidisciplinary, operating “at the critical juncture of medical science and the legal system.”
Forensic nursing is a specialized branch that integrates medical expertise with forensic science to provide comprehensive care for individuals impacted by violence, abuse, or criminal activities. These professionals serve as a crucial link between the realms of healthcare and the legal system, collaborating with law enforcement, attorneys, and other professionals to gather evidence, provide expert testimony, and ensure justice for victims.
When I started my forensic career 29 years ago, I was solely involved in the capture and processing of fingerprints from criminals. If I may be honest, the well-being of the individual who provided the forensic evidence was NOT an overriding concern.
But within a year or two I started to get involved in the capture and processing of fingerprints from NON-criminals who were applying for and receiving government benefits.
For that market we HAD to concern ourselves with the well-being of our clients, to make fingerprint capture as easy as possible, and to treat our clients with the utmost respect.
In the end it didn’t matter, because in the popular mind fingerprinting was associated with criminals, and benefits recipients didn’t want to be treated like criminals no matter how nice we were. To my knowledge, all of the benefits recipient fingerprint programs in the United States have all ceased.
Forensic nursing needs to gather the necessary forensic evidence while preserving the compassionate care that nurses are required to provide.
Invasive forensic techniques
So if we have to take care when gathering information from benefits recipients, imagine the level of care we need to take when gathering information from crime victims. Returning to 1NURSE.COM’s article, here are two of the tasks that forensic nurses must perform:
Sexual Assault Forensics: Specializing in sexual assault examination, forensic nurses provide not only compassionate care but also play a pivotal role in collecting evidence essential for legal proceedings. Their expertise ensures a sensitive approach while preserving the integrity of forensic evidence. Example: A forensic nurse conducting a sexual assault examination may collect biological samples and document injuries to aid in prosecuting the assailant.
Child Abuse Investigation: Forensic nurses are instrumental in assessing and documenting cases of child abuse. They collaborate with child protective services and law enforcement to ensure the safety and well-being of the child. Example: A forensic nurse working on a child abuse case may conduct a thorough examination to document injuries and provide expert testimony in court.
We have focussed a lot on how the investigation works when looking for crimes of a distressing nature but not actually how this investigation process can affect the victim of these crimes and put the victim first. This period can be incredibly distressing for the victim, and the investigation can make this worse as it is making the victim re-live this experience.
As part of their duties, the forensic nurse has to capture evidence from the very parts of the body that were assaulted during the abuse crime itself. No one wants to go through that again. How can evidence capture be less invasive?
Three ways to minimize invasive evidence capture
While it’s not possible to completely erase the pain that crime victims suffer during a forensic investigation, there are ways to minimize it. The Foster+Freeman article highlights three ways to do this:
Capture evidence via non-invasive techniques. As a supplier of alternate light source (ALS) technology, Foster+Freeman notes that its products can discover evidence, even at the subdermal layers, without touching the victim. “Using an ALS is a non-invasive and non-destructive way to examine potential evidence on the skin. This is especially important when dealing with fragile or sensitive skin, as it minimizes the risk of causing further harm during the examination process.”
Capture evidence quickly. Forensic nurses do not want to prolong an examination. There are ways to gather evidence as quickly as possible. For example, rather than using multiple ALS devices, you can use a single one; Foster+Freeman’s Crime-lite® X Serology Search Kit is “a multispectral light source that has been made with five wavelengths of light integrated into one unit.”
Capture evidence thoroughly. What’s the point of putting a victim through the trauma of evidence capture if it doesn’t result in a conviction? Because of this, it’s important to capture as much evidence as possible. A variety of alternate light sources accomplishes this.
Foster+Freeman is just one of a multifarious array of companies that supply evidence collection solutions to forensic nurses and other forensic professionals.
And no, Foster+Freeman didn’t sponsor this post, although Bredemarket is available to provide writing services to Foster+Freeman or to other companies who need to drive content results.
And now that I’ve successfully used “multifarious,” I need to find a way to use “deleterious.” Keep your eyes open.
Before you can fully understand the difference between personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI), you need to understand the difference between biometrics and…biometrics. (You know sometimes words have two meanings.)
Designed by Google Gemini.
The definitions of biometrics
To address the difference between biometrics and biometrics, I’ll refer to something I wrote over two years ago, in late 2021. In that post, I quoted two paragraphs from the International Biometric Society that illustrated the difference.
Since the IBS has altered these paragraphs in the intervening years, I will quote from the latest version.
The terms “Biometrics” and “Biometry” have been used since early in the 20th century to refer to the field of development of statistical and mathematical methods applicable to data analysis problems in the biological sciences.
Statistical methods for the analysis of data from agricultural field experiments to compare the yields of different varieties of wheat, for the analysis of data from human clinical trials evaluating the relative effectiveness of competing therapies for disease, or for the analysis of data from environmental studies on the effects of air or water pollution on the appearance of human disease in a region or country are all examples of problems that would fall under the umbrella of “Biometrics” as the term has been historically used….
The term “Biometrics” has also been used to refer to the field of technology devoted to the identification of individuals using biological traits, such as those based on retinal or iris scanning, fingerprints, or face recognition. Neither the journal “Biometrics” nor the International Biometric Society is engaged in research, marketing, or reporting related to this technology. Likewise, the editors and staff of the journal are not knowledgeable in this area.
In brief, what I call “broad biometrics” refers to analyzing biological sciences data, ranging from crop yields to heart rates. Contrast this with what I call “narrow biometrics,” which (usually) refers only to human beings, and only to those characteristics that identify human beings, such as the ridges on a fingerprint.
The definition of “personally identifiable information” (PII)
Information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity, either alone or when combined with other information that is linked or linkable to a specific individual.
Note the key words “alone or when combined.” The ten numbers “909 867 5309” are not sufficient to identify an individual alone, but can identify someone when combined with information from another source, such as a telephone book.
What types of information can be combined to identify a person? The U.S. Department of Defense’s Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Freedom of Information Directorate provides multifarious examples of PII, including:
Social Security Number.
Passport number.
Driver’s license number.
Taxpayer identification number.
Patient identification number.
Financial account number.
Credit card number.
Personal address.
Personal telephone number.
Photographic image of a face.
X-rays.
Fingerprints.
Retina scan.
Voice signature.
Facial geometry.
Date of birth.
Place of birth.
Race.
Religion.
Geographical indicators.
Employment information.
Medical information.
Education information.
Financial information.
Now you may ask yourself, “How can I identify someone by a non-unique birthdate? A lot of people were born on the same day!”
But the combination of information is powerful, as researchers discovered in a 2015 study cited by the New York Times.
In the study, titled “Unique in the Shopping Mall: On the Reidentifiability of Credit Card Metadata,” a group of data scientists analyzed credit card transactions made by 1.1 million people in 10,000 stores over a three-month period. The data set contained details including the date of each transaction, amount charged and name of the store.
Although the information had been “anonymized” by removing personal details like names and account numbers, the uniqueness of people’s behavior made it easy to single them out.
In fact, knowing just four random pieces of information was enough to reidentify 90 percent of the shoppers as unique individuals and to uncover their records, researchers calculated. And that uniqueness of behavior — or “unicity,” as the researchers termed it — combined with publicly available information, like Instagram or Twitter posts, could make it possible to reidentify people’s records by name.
Now biometrics only form part of the multifarious list of data cited above, but clearly biometric data can be combined with other data to identify someone. An easy example is taking security camera footage of the face of a person walking into a store, and combining that data with the same face taken from a database of driver’s license holders. In some jurisdictions, some entities are legally permitted to combine this data, while others are legally prohibited from doing so. (A few do it anyway. But I digress.)
Because narrow biometric data used for identification, such as fingerprint ridges, can be combined with other data to personally identify an individual, organizations that process biometric data must undertake strict safeguards to protect that data. If personally identifiable information (PII) is not adequately guarded, people could be subject to fraud and other harms.
The definition of “protected health information” (PHI)
Protected Health Information. The Privacy Rule protects all “individually identifiable health information” held or transmitted by a covered entity or its business associate, in any form or media, whether electronic, paper, or oral. The Privacy Rule calls this information “protected health information (PHI).”12
“Individually identifiable health information” is information, including demographic data, that relates to:
the individual’s past, present or future physical or mental health or condition,
the provision of health care to the individual, or
the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to the individual,
and that identifies the individual or for which there is a reasonable basis to believe it can be used to identify the individual.13 Individually identifiable health information includes many common identifiers (e.g., name, address, birth date, Social Security Number).
The Privacy Rule excludes from protected health information employment records that a covered entity maintains in its capacity as an employer and education and certain other records subject to, or defined in, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C. §1232g.
Now there’s obviously an overlap between personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI). For example, names, dates of birth, and Social Security Numbers fall into both categories. But I want to highlight two things are are explicitly mentioned as PHI that aren’t usually cited as PII.
Physical or mental health data. This could include information that a medical professional captures from a patient, including biometric (broad biometric) information such as heart rate or blood pressure.
Health care provided to an individual. This not only includes written information such as prescriptions, but oral information (“take two aspirin and call my chatbot in the morning”). Yes, chatbot. Deal with it. Dr. Marcus Welby and his staff retired a long time ago.
Robert Young (“Marcus Welby”) and Jane Wyatt (“Margaret Anderson” on a different show). By ABC TelevisionUploaded by We hope at en.wikipedia – eBay itemphoto informationTransferred from en.wikipedia by SreeBot, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16472486
Because broad biometric data used for analysis, such as heart rates, can be combined with other data to personally identify an individual, organizations that process biometric data must undertake strict safeguards to protect that data. If protected health information (PHI) is not adequately guarded, people could be subject to fraud and other harms.
Simple, isn’t it?
Actually, the parallels between identity/biometrics and healthcare have fascinated me for decades, since the dedicated hardware to capture identity/biometric data is often similar to the dedicated hardware to capture health data. And now that we’re moving away from dedicated hardware to multi-purpose hardware such as smartphones, the parallels are even more fascinating.
Robert Young (“Marcus Welby”) and Jane Wyatt (“Margaret Anderson” on a different show). By ABC TelevisionUploaded by We hope at en.wikipedia – eBay itemphoto informationTransferred from en.wikipedia by SreeBot, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16472486
We’ve come a long way since the days of Marcus Welby, M.D. (who was a fictional character).
Back in the days of Marcus Welby, M.D., we trusted the doctor as the sole provider of medical information. Doctor knows best!
Later, we learned about health by searching the Internet ourselves, using sources of varying trustworthiness such as pharmaceutical company commercials.
Now, we don’t even conduct the searches ourselves, but let an artificial intelligence healthcare bot search for us, even though the bot hallucinates sometimes.
A “hallucination” occurs when generative AI is convinced that its answer is correct, even when it is wrong. These hallucinations could be a problem—in healthcare, literally a matter of life or death.
For example, a counselor may tell a patient with a substance use disorder to use an app in order to track cravings, states of mind, and other information helpful in treating addiction. The app may recommend certain therapeutic actions in case the counselor cannot be reached. Setting aside preemption issues raised by Food and Drug Administration regulation of these apps, important questions in tort law arise. If these therapeutic actions are contraindicated and result in harm to the patient or others, is the app to blame? Or does the doctor who prescribed the app bear the blame?
That’s right. WHO is going to ensure that these bots can be trusted.
A World Health Organization publication…
…underscores the critical need to ensure the safety and efficacy of AI systems, accelerating their availability to those in need and encouraging collaboration among various stakeholders, including developers, regulators, manufacturers, healthcare professionals, and patients.
According to WHO, its document proposes six areas of artificial intelligence regulation for health.
To foster trust, the publication stresses the importance of transparency and documentation, such as through documenting the entire product lifecycle and tracking development processes.
For risk management, issues like ‘intended use’, ‘continuous learning’, human interventions, training models and cybersecurity threats must all be comprehensively addressed, with models made as simple as possible.
Externally validating data and being clear about the intended use of AI helps assure safety and facilitate regulation.
A commitment to data quality, such as through rigorously evaluating systems pre-release, is vital to ensuring systems do not amplify biases and errors.
The challenges posed by important, complex regulations – such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States of America – are addressed with an emphasis on understanding the scope of jurisdiction and consent requirements, in service of privacy and data protection.
Fostering collaboration between regulatory bodies, patients, healthcare professionals, industry representatives, and government partners, can help ensure products and services stay compliant with regulation throughout their lifecycles.
It’s the end of an era for a once-critical pandemic document: The ubiquitous white COVID-19 vaccination cards are being phased out.
Now that COVID-19 vaccines are not being distributed by the federal government, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped printing new cards.
This doesn’t affect the validity of current cards. It just means that if you get a COVID vaccine, or any future vaccine, and you need to prove you obtained it, you will have to contact the medical facility who administered it.
Or, in selected states (because in the U.S. health is generally a state and not a federal responsibility), you can access the state’s digital health information. For example, the state of Washington offers MyIRmobile, as do the states of Arizona, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, and West Virginia.
Sign up for MyIR Mobile by going to myirmobile.com and follow the registration instructions. Your registration information will be used to match your records with the state immunization registry. You will be sent a verification code on your phone to finalize the process. Once registration is complete, you’ll be able to view your immunization records, Certificate of Immunization Status (CIS) and access your COVID-19 vaccination certificate.
Does your firm fight crooks who try to fraudulently use synthetic identities? If so, how do you communicate your solution?
This post explains what synthetic identities are (with examples), tells four ways to detect synthetic identities, and closes by providing an answer to the communication question.
While this post is primarily intended for identity firms who can use Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services, anyone else who is interested in synthetic identities can read along.
What are synthetic identities?
To explain what synthetic identities are, let me start by telling you about Jason Brown.
Jason Brown wasn’t Jason Brown
You may not have heard of him unless you lived in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019 and lived near the apartment he rented.
Jason Brown’s renting of an apartment isn’t all that unusual.
If you were to visit Brown’s apartment in February 2019, you would find credit cards and financial information for Adam M. Lopez and Carlos Rivera.
Now that’s a little unusual, especially since Lopez and Rivera never existed.
For that matter, Jason Brown never existed either.
A Georgia man was sentenced Sept. 1 (2022) to more than seven years in federal prison for participating in a nationwide fraud ring that used stolen social security numbers, including those belonging to children, to create synthetic identities used to open lines of credit, create shell companies, and steal nearly $2 million from financial institutions….
Cato joined conspiracies to defraud banks and illegally possess credit cards. Cato and his co-conspirators created “synthetic identities” by combining false personal information such as fake names and dates of birth with the information of real people, such as their social security numbers. Cato and others then used the synthetic identities and fake ID documents to open bank and credit card accounts at financial institutions. Cato and his co-conspirators used the unlawfully obtained credit cards to fund their lifestyles.
Talking about synthetic identity at Victoria Gardens
Here’s a video that I created on Saturday that describes, at a very high level, how synthetic identities can be used fraudulently. People who live near Rancho Cucamonga, California will recognize the Victoria Gardens shopping center, proof that synthetic identity theft can occur far away from Georgia.
Note that synthetic identity theft different from stealing someone else’s existing identity. In this case, a new identity is created.
So how do you catch these fraudsters?
Catching the identity synthesizers
If you’re renting out an apartment, and Jason Brown shows you his driver’s license and provides his Social Security Number, how can you detect if Brown is a crook? There are four methods to verify that Jason Brown exists, and that he’s the person renting your apartment.
Method One: Private Databases
One way to check Jason Brown’s story is to perform credit checks and other data investigations using financial databases.
Did Jason Brown just spring into existence within the past year, with no earlier credit record? That seems suspicious.
Does Jason Brown’s credit record appear TOO clean? That seems suspicious.
Does Jason Brown share information such as a common social security number with other people? Are any of those other identities also fraudulent? That is DEFINITELY suspicious.
This is one way that many firms detect synthetic identities, and for some firms it is the ONLY way they detect synthetic identities. And these firms have to tell their story to their prospects.
If your firm offers a tool to verify identities via private databases, how do you let your prospects know the benefits of your tool, and why your solution is better than all other solutions?
Method Two: Check That Driver’s License (or other government document)
What about that driver’s license that Brown presented? There are a wide variety of software tools that can check the authenticity of driver’s licenses, passports, and other government-issued documents. Some of these tools existed back in 2019 when “Brown” was renting his apartment, and a number of them exist today.
Maybe your firm has created such a tool, or uses a tool from a third party.
If your firm offers this capability, how can your prospects learn about its benefits, and why your solution excels?
Method Three: Check Government Databases
Checking the authenticity of a government-issued document may not be enough, since the document itself may be legitimate, but the implied credentials may no longer be legitimate. For example, if my California driver’s license expires in 2025, but I move to Minnesota in 2023 and get a new license, my California driver’s license is no longer valid, even though I have it in my possession.
Why not check the database of the Department of Motor Vehicles (or the equivalent in your state) to see if there is still an active driver’s license for that person?
The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) maintains a Driver’s License Data Verification (DLDV) Service in which participating jurisdictions allow other entities to verify the license data for individuals. Your firm may be able to access the DLDV data for selected jurisdictions, providing an extra identity verification tool.
If your firm offers this capability, how can your prospects learn where it is available, what its benefits are, and why it is an important part of your solution?
Method Four: Conduct the “Who You Are” Test
There is one more way to confirm that a person is real, and that is to check the person. Literally.
If someone on a smartphone or videoconference says that they are Jason Brown, how do you know that it’s the real Jason Brown and not Jim Smith, or a previous recording or simulation of Jason Brown?
This is where tools such as facial recognition and liveness detection come to play.
You can ensure that the live face matches any face on record.
You can also confirm that the face is truly a live face.
In addition to these two tests, you can compare the face against the face on the presented driver’s license or passport to offer additional confirmation of true identity.
Now some companies offer facial recognition, others offer liveness detection, others match the live face to a face on a government ID, and many companies offer two or three of these capabilities.
One more time: if your firm offers these capabilities—either your own or someone else’s—what are the benefits of your algorithms? (For example, are they more accurate than competing algorithms? And under what conditions?) And why is your solution better than the others?
This is for the firms who fight synthetic identities
While most of this post is of general interest to anyone dealing with synthetic identities, this part of this post is specifically addressed to identity and biometric firms who provide synthetic identity-fighting solutions.
When you communicate about your solutions, your communicator needs to have certain types of experience.
Industry experience. Perhaps you sell your identity solution to financial institutions, or educational institutions , or a host of other industries (gambling/gaming, healthcare, hospitality, retailers, or sport/concert venues, or others). You need someone with this industry experience.
Solution experience. Perhaps your communications require someone with 29 years of experience in identity, biometrics, and technology marketing, including experience with all five factors of authentication (and verification).
Communication experience. Perhaps you need to effectively communicate with your prospects in a customer focused, benefits-oriented way. (Content that is all about you and your features won’t win business.)
If you haven’t read a Bredemarket blog post before, or even if you have, you may not realize that this post is jam-packed with additional information well beyond the post itself. This post alone links to the following Bredemarket posts and other content. You may want to follow one or more of the 13 links below if you need additional information on a particular topic:
Here’s my latest brochure for the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, my standard package to create your 400 to 600 word blog posts and LinkedIn articles. Be sure to check the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service page for updates.
This post explains what “pillar pages” are, the pros and cons of Bredemarket’s pillar pages, what I’ve learned from the “Target Audience” pillar page that I created, and how this can help your business deliver effective, converting messages to your prospects.
What are pillar pages?
I’ve been working on “pillar pages” for the Bredemarket website for over a year now.
As I stated before in an April 2022 blog post, a “pillar page” is simply a central “cluster” page on your website that discusses an important topic, and which is linked to other pages that provide more detail on the topic.
Think of a wheel with a hub and spokes. The pillar page is the hub, and the related pages are the spokes.
Now these pillar pages aren’t as mature as I’d like them to be.
I haven’t really multi-layered my keywords that link to the pillar; currently things are fairly simplistic where benefit “spoke” blog posts link to the benefits “hub” pillar. I haven’t explicitly optimized the “hub and spokes” for people who search for, say, features.
Similarly, the organization of each pillar page is fairly simplistic. Each pillar starts with a brief discussion of the topic in question, and is then followed by excerpts from and links to blog posts that provide more detail on the topic. (And the blog posts themselves link back to the pillar, providing bidirectional…um, benefits.) It’s functional, but perhaps you’d be better served if the pillars grouped subtopics together, rather than listing all the blog posts in reverse chronological order.
But the pillars do their work in terms of navigation and search engine optimization. If you want to find out what Bredemarket says about a topic such as benefits, it’s fairly easy to find this.
What have I learned from the Bredemarket Target Audience pillar page?
This post delves into the fifth of my five pillar pages, the Target Audience page.
I’ve recently worked on beefing up this pillar page by linking to more Bredemarket blog posts that discuss target audiences. And in the process of making these additions, I’ve realized some things about target audiences that I wanted to summarize here. (Repurposing content refocuses the mind, I guess.)
In the process of improving my pillar page, I’ve gleaned five truths about target audiences:
You need to define at least one target audience.
It’s not illegal to have multiple target audiences.
Different target audiences get different messages.
You can create personas, or you can not create personas. Whatever floats your boat.
Target audience definition focuses your content.
I’ll discuss each of these truths and suggest how they can improve your firm’s content.
One: You Need to Define At Least One Target Audience.
The first and most important thing is that you need a target audience before you start writing.
If you have no target audience, who is receiving your message? How do you know what to say?
For example, the primary target audience for THIS blog post is anyone from any type of company who could use Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services. It’s not limited to just the identity folks, or just the Inland Empire folks. If it were, I’d write it differently.
The content addressed two target audiences at the same time, although this post prioritized the companies looking for full-time employees.
As long as you know in advance what you’re going to do, you can define multiple target audiences. Just don’t define a dozen target audiences for a 288-character tweet.
Three: Different Target Audiences Get Different Messages.
Perhaps you are writing a single piece of content that must address multiple target audiences. A proposal is an example of this. For example, a proposal in response to a request for proposal (RFP) for an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) affects multiple target audiences.
Here’s an example of multiple target audiences for a theoretical Ontario, California ABIS proposal, taken from a May 2021 Bredemarket post:
Field investigators.
Examiners.
People who capture biometrics.
Information Technologies.
Purchasing.
The privacy advocate.
The mayor.
Others.
That’s a lot of target audiences, but if you’re submitting a 300 page proposal that answers hundreds of individual questions, you have the ability to customize each of the hundreds of responses to address the affected target audience(s).
For example, if the RFP asks about the maximum resolution of captured latent fingerprint images, your response will address the needs of the “examiner” target audience. Your response to that question won’t need to say anything about your compliance with city purchasing regulations. (Unless you have a really weird city, which is possible I guess.)
At the same time, if the RFP asks if you comply with E-Verify, this is NOT the time to brag about supporting 4,000 pixels per inch image capture.
Four: You Can Create Personas, Or You Can Not Create Personas. Whatever Floats Your Boat.
If you haven’t read the Bredemarket blog that much, you should know that I’m not very hung up on processes—unless my client (or my employer) insists on them. Then they’re the most important thing in the world.
If you find yourself trapped in a room (preferably padded) with a bunch of certified marketing professionals, they’ll probably toss around the word “persona” a lot. A persona helps you visualize your target audience by writing to someone with a particular set of attributes. Here’s an example from the October 2022 post I cited earlier:
Jane Smith is a 54 year old single white owner of a convenience store in a rural area with an MBA and a love for Limp Bizkit…
If I’m going to write a particular piece of content, this persona helps me focus my writing. As I write, I can picture Jane in my mind, fetching the giant cups for the soda dispenser, planning her next trip to the big city, and wondering if her customers would mind if she started blasting this song.
Not the Seldom Scene.
Having this persona in my mind can be an excellent writing support.
What would Jane think about a list of target audience truths?
What would Jane think if a Limp Bizkit song appeared in the middle of the list? (She’d like that.)
So you can create personas, either on the fly (take a LinkedIn profile of a real person and change a few facts so that the persona becomes Jim, a 35 year old product/content marketer who specializes in healthcare) or through an extensive and expensive persona research program.
But what if you escape from the padded room, run away from the marketing professionals, and swear up and down that you will never ever create a persona?
Will your marketing efforts die?
No they won’t.
You can still target your writing without inventing demographic information about the person reading your content.
It depends upon the effort you want to invest in the task.
Five: Target Audience Definition Focuses Your Content.
I kind of already said this, but I wanted to explicitly repeat it and emphasize it.
Regardless of whether your target audience is defined by an expensive research effort, a tweak of a real person’s LinkedIn profile, or the simple statement “we want to target latent fingerprint examiners,” the simple act of defining your target audience focuses your content.
Your text addresses the target audience, and doesn’t go off on tangents that bear no relation to your target audience.
This makes your message much more effective.
But is the message of this post resonating with companies needing content creators?
If you’re still reading, I guess it is.
Bredemarket can help you define your target audience for your content, and can help you define other things also that are necessary for effective content.
Would you like to talk to me about the content you want to create, and the message you want to deliver to your target audience?
Are you ready to take your firm to the next level with a compelling message that addresses your target audience(s) and increases awareness, consideration, conversion, and long-term revenue?
Back in 2021, it seemed that I was commenting on the EU Digital COVID Certificate (EUDCC) ad nauseum. The EUDCC is the “vaccine passport” that was developed to allow people in member EU countries to prove their COVID vaccination status in another EU country.
August 2021 was the last time that I wrote about the EUDCC in the Bredemarket blog. Until now.
Enter…WHO?
You know how standards are adopted by brute force from big players? Well, one big player has forced itself into the discussion. That player is the World Health Organization, commonly known as WHO.
Stella Kyriakides, the European commissioner for health and food safety (announced) that the voluntary certificate program has already been taken up by almost 80 countries.
Last I checked there were not 80 countries in the EU. So this health standards thing took off after the initial hiccups. Although the Wikipedia list of non-EU adopting countries does not include two big players—the United States and China (the same two countries I cited in my August 2021 post).
WHO’s Global Digital Health Certification Network is an open-source platform, built on robust & transparent standards that establishes the first building block of digital public health infrastructure for developing a wide range of digital products for strengthening pandemic preparedness and to deliver better health for all….
The GDHCN is builds (sic) upon the experience of regional networks for COVID-19 Certificates and takes up the infrastructure and experiences with the digital European Union Digital COVID Certificate (EU DCC) system, which has seen adoption across all Member States of the EU as well as 51 non-EU countries and territories. The GDHCN has been designed to be interoperable with other existing regional networks (e.g., ICAO VSD-NC, DIVOC, LACPass, SMART Health Cards) specifications.
On the surface it sounds great, but we’ll see what happens when it goes live (Borak states that the go-live date is July 1).
And we’ll see how it expands:
To facilitate the uptake of the EU DCC by WHO and contribute to its operation and further development, WHO and the European Commission have agreed to partner in digital health.
This partnership will work to technically develop the WHO system with a staged approach to cover additional use cases, which may include, for example, the digitisation of the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Expanding such digital solutions will be essential to deliver better health for citizens across the globe.
But try telling that to the Faith Bible Institute, or to an employee of Frontier Booking International. (I’ll admit that the founder of the latter company, Ian Copeland, chose the company name deliberately. After all, his brother Miles founded I.R.S. Records, and their father worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.)
It’s best not to use acronyms at all and instead use full words. Because if you use full words, then (as Ed McMahon would say) you will ensure that EVERYONE knows exactly what you mean.
But for the folks at Merriam-Webster, this is only a secondary definition of the word “biometrics.” From their perspective, biometrics is primarily biometry, which can refer to “the statistical analysis of biological observations and phenomena” or to “measurement (as by ultrasound or MRI) of living tissue or bodily structures.” In other words, someone’s health, not someone’s identity.
The terms “Biometrics” and “Biometry” have been used since early in the 20th century to refer to the field of development of statistical and mathematical methods applicable to data analysis problems in the biological sciences.
Recently, the term “Biometrics” has also been used to refer to the emerging field of technology devoted to the identification of individuals using biological traits, such as those based on retinal or iris scanning, fingerprints, or face recognition. Neither the journal “Biometrics” nor the International Biometric Society is engaged in research, marketing, or reporting related to this technology. Likewise, the editors and staff of the journal are not knowledgeable in this area.
Despite this, there are some parallels between biometrics and biometrics. After all, both biometrics and biometrics take body measurements (albeit for different reasons), and therefore some devices that can be used for biometry can sometimes also be used for identification, and vice versa.
But only sometimes. Your run-of-the-mill optical fingerprint reader won’t contribute to any medical diagnosis, and I’m still on the fence regarding whether brain waves can be used to identify individuals. I need a sample size larger than 50 people before I’ll claim brain waves as a reliable biometric.
Of course, a biometric device such as an Apple Watch can not only measure your biometrics, but also your geolocation, which is another authentication factor.
I’m sure that many people imagine that standards are developed by a group of reasonable people, sitting in a room, who are pursuing things for the good of the world.
You can stop laughing now.
As I noted back in 2013, and again in February, there are many instances in which standards do not evolve from a well-designed process. In reality, standards emerge via that process that I referred to in February as “brute force.”
For those who are not familiar with the “brute force” process, I’ll provide two illustrations.
If a lot of people like something, it’s a standard.
If a trillion dollar company likes something, and I like something different, then the thing that the trillion dollar company likes is a standard.
If two trillion dollar companies like two different things…it can get messy.
Back in February, I was just beginning to talk about something that I called “health passports” at the time. Later, I personally decided that “health passports” is a poor choice of words, and have instead gravitated to using the phrase “vaccine certificate.”
Regardless, my concern back in February was that there were all sorts of these things floating around. Even back then, Clear had its own solution, IATA had one, IBM had one, iProov had one, Daon had one, and there were many, many more.
So what happens if I have a Clear vaccine certificate but the airline or building that I’m approaching supports the iProov certificate? Can the iProov certificate read the Clear certificate? Or do I have to get multiple certificates?
This post looks at a new development in the vaccine certificate brouhaha. I’m not talking about what vaccines are honored by the vaccine certificate, but about acceptability of the vaccine certificates themselves. In particular, I’m talking about acceptance of one certificate, the EU Digital COVID Certificate (EUDCC).
How do international air transport folks feel about the EUDCC?
While the EUDCC can conceivably be used for a number of use cases, such as entering a private business like a restaurant, one of the most popular use cases for the EUDCC is to board an airplane that is crossing an international border.
So if there was an organization that was dedicated to the business of flying airplanes across international borders, and if that organization thought that the EUDCC was pretty cool, then that endorsement would have as much pull as Google (and Facebook) endorsing a web image format.
Now those who read my February post will recall that IATA was one of those groups that was already developing its own vaccination certificate. So how does the EUDCC compare with the the IATA Travel Pass?
The DCC…is fully supported by IATA Travel Pass.
But in addition to mere self-interest, there is another reason why IATA is endorsing the EUDCC: it’s supported by a lot of countries inside the EU, and other countries are looking at the EUDCC as a model.
The EU DCC is implemented in the 27 EU Member states and a number of reciprocal agreements have been agreed with other states’ own vaccination certificates, including Switzerland, Turkey, and Ukraine. In the absence of a single global standard for digital vaccination certificates, up to 60 other countries are looking to use the DCC specification for their own certification.
Oh no, I’m just looking
However, it’s one thing to be “looking” at something, and another thing entirely to actually “do” something.
Before assuming that the EUDCC will become the de facto DCC, consider how two countries in particular will approach it.
This image or media was taken or created by Matt H. Wade. To see his entire portfolio, click here. @thatmattwade This image is protected by copyright! If you would like to use it, please read this first. – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5004719
One of those countries is my own, the United States of America. While one can argue whether or not the U.S. enjoys the same level of power that it enjoyed immediately after the end of the Cold War, it is still a major player in world economic and travel affairs. And regardless of who the President of the United States is at any given time, the U.S. has often decided to go its own way. Couple this with the power of individual U.S. states in my country’s federal system, and it’s quite possible that even if the U.S. goes along with IATA, and some form of the EUDCC is adopted by our Transportation Security Administration, that does not necessarily mean that the same certificate can be used as it is in Europe to grant access to museums, sporting events, and concerts.
The other country that may have an issue with the EUDCC is China. If the United States is potentially a waning world power, China is potentially a gaining world power. The relationship between China and the rest of the world varies from time to time and from issue to issue. China may decide that it’s not in its best interest to adhere to an international standard for certifications of COVID vaccination, testing, or contraction. And if it’s not in China’s best interest, China won’t do it.
So before declaring that IATA endorsement of the EUDCC settles the issue…we’ll see.
Bredemarket 