PQMD: Medical Surplus Recovery Organization Planning

Photo of Carter Center BannerLori Warrens, the executive director of the Partnership for Quality Medical Donations (PQMD), VisionLink's Lois Ann Porter and others are on-site today planning the upcoming Medical Surplus Recovery Organization (MSRO) Conference to be held at the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta this July.

MSROs from across the country will join PQMD, the U.S. Department of Defense, the World Health Organization, the Catholic Health Association, MedShare and Project HOPE to evaluate recently-released standards for MSROs regarding the collection and distribution of medical surplus to those most in need around the world.

Courtney Baird, Lori Warrens,
Shelly Miller
Shipment bound for Haiti
This is a tremendously forward looking effort as organizations which in some ways compete with one another are coming together to work together.  It's the way good works get done well.

Dr. W. Douglas Zimmerman
President & CEO
VisionLink, Inc.


Popular posts from this blog

5 Billion Data Field Exchanges A Month

Image
What have we learned?Moving so many fields of data every month has taught us a few things. The first is that the structure of your data matters a great deal, particularly if you need data exchanges to be quick and inexpensive. To do that--one needs to structure the data correctly in the first place.

Dry topic? Sorry. Here is a fun animation to make it more interesting. Caution: the music starts up in scene three, and you'll be humming the tune later today. It's less than three minutes long. Check it out here:

https://support.communityos.org/vl-video
More detail on Data PointsWe track the traffic across our APIs by "data points" which is simply one data field exchanged one time. If a record with 50 fields on it is called 100 times, that would be 5,000 data points.

The amount of transferred data also depends on the amount of data in the fields that are exchanged or queried. Some fields may only have a few characters or a simple "yes" or "no." Other fiel…
Keep reading

New Password Standards

Image
None of us like passwords.Well, except for the good they do for us.

New research from NIST helps us to understand better ways to build passwords, and Visionlink has released an upgrade to its CommunityOS 2 platform in response.

The most fundamental change in the standards by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), is about the frequency of forcing password changes. Survey says? Never.

That's right: in common use, requirements to change passwords every 30 or 180 days, as examples, result in less secure passwords.

The second major change concerns a previous recommendation to mix letters and numbers. Gone. And again, this is because the complexity causes real-world users to use passwords that can be broken too easily, and also because automated password breakers can easily deal with something like "st0rmC1ouds."

Repeated patterns (aaabbbccc) and sequences of adjacent keys on keyboards (jklnm), and common passwords are further examples of what we all should av…
Keep reading

FEMA Partnership Day

Image
FEMA NVOAD Partnership Day!This is an annual event designed to bring together governmental disaster agencies, non-governmental agencies, faith-based organizations and private sector providers who support disaster responders. Partnership day serves to familiarize everyone with the agency capabilities and technologies that are available when disasters strike. 

Visionlink attends due to our work with both government and nonprofit disaster agencies. We are pleased to provide systems used by both FEMA, and NVOAD and their member agencies. It is an honor to do so! Our systems are designed to allow the emergency management community to work more effectively whether that is through intake, case management, volunteering, contributed goods and services--and coordinated multi-agency collaboration.

The event is open to the public and is being hosted at the national FEMA headquarters in WDC. Learn more from FEMA and about NVOAD.
Keep reading