Vernon College Partners with
Business Consortium for $830,060
Grant to Train More than
One Thousand Workers
A four-member business consortium has partnered with Vernon College to provide job training using an $830,060 Skills Development Fund grant from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC). The partnering employers in the grant are Albert Moving and Storage, Magic Aire (United Electric), Alcoa Howmet and Sealed Air Corp...(continue)

Institute of International Education Joins Consortium to Promote European Doctoral Programs
A new project called PromoDoc focusing on the promotion of European higher education at the doctoral level has just been selected by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency in Brussels within the....(continue)

Autism Consortium Study in
Pediatrics Shows CMA
Finds More Genetic Abnormalities
than Current Tests
The Autism Consortium, an innovative research, clinical and family collaboration dedicated to catalyzing research and enhancing clinical care for families with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), announced today that the results of its comparison study of genetic testing methods for autism spectrum disorders is available from the journal Pediatrics through early online release in their eFirst pages today and will appear in the journal's April issue. The study revealed that chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA) had the...(continue)

Global Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers Awards $15K Medical scholarship set for MS Research
Officials of the global Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers — which staged its annual meeting in downtown San Antonio — announced the creation of a $15,000...(continue)

Self-Funded Health Insurance
Is Your Organization Ready to Commit to a Self-Funded Medical Plan?
By Dan Cunningham

Because of our experience in the insurance carrier risk side of self-funding, we are often asked to analyze whether or not a client is a good candidate for moving their organization from fully insured carrier-provided health insurance coverage to self-funding. Our company is highly experienced in the insurance carrier risk side of self-funding.

As most employers know when investigating self-funding, there is insurance carrier coverage known as stop loss insurance, which is used to protect a self-funded medical plan in case of a single catastrophic employee medical claim or multiple catastrophic medical claims.

When our company is presented a case, the scenario goes something like this: “Dan, we’ve received a thirty percent rate increase on our medical plan renewal. Can you give us a self-funded option? ” Our answer is always the same: That depends...(continue)

Westbrook Technologies—Case Study
Paying Bills With Less Paper
Purchase orders and paperwork. The two are indelibly linked for most administrators working every day in school environments around the nation. In their attempts to search, retrieve and distribute information quickly, administrators have found that managing documents online creates a more productive and efficient atmosphere. One such example of this movement is the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Paper Problem
University of Utah's Accounts Payable Department receives between 4,000 and 5,000 documents each day in its role of managing AP transactions for more than 500 business offices at the university. The documentation was being managed with a system of microfilm and paper files, keeping the department of 26 people very busy.

Whenever a business officer requested backup documentation regarding a voucher that appeared in their financial statement, an AP employee would most often have to first find the pertinent transaction on the accounts payable system that contained the microfilm cartridge and frame data. Then they would leave their desk for the microfilm readers, and spool through a microfilm cartridge to locate and copy the documents - it was a time-consuming process...(continue)