Current News

The New England Telehealth Consortium (NETC), which is working with FairPoint Communications to link healthcare facilities in northern New England to the NETC network, recently made its 250th connection. FairPoint is providing Carrier Ethernet Services (CES) to the NETC sites in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont offering data transport speeds up to 1 gigabit per second.

Attorney General Bill Sorrell has named the litigation team that will defend the lawsuit filed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, Snack Food Association, International Dairy Foods Association, and National Association of Manufacturers that challenges the constitutionality of Vermont’s recently enacted law requiring the labeling of foods produced with genetic engineering. Sorrell announced that the State’s defense team will be a combination of talent from both within and outside of Vermont.

The lead attorney on the case will be Assistant Attorney General Megan J Shafritz, Chief of the Attorney General’s Civil Division. She will be joined by several other AGO staff attorneys including Jon Alexander, Kyle Landis-Marinello, and Naomi Sheffield. In related news, Sorrell announced that Kate Duffy, Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Human Resources, will be returning to the Vermont Attorney General’s Office and will be an integral part of the defense team.

Kate Duffy will be joining the Vermont Attorney General’s Office according to Attorney General Bill Sorrell. Duffy will be leaving her job as the Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Human Resources. Duffy served as an Assistant Attorney General for six years before she was appointed as Deputy Commissioner of the Department in 2009.

“I am very excited about Kate rejoining my team,” said Sorrell. “She is an accomplished trial attorney who has represented both state and corporate clients in complex litigation around the country for over 20 years. Kate will be a member of the Attorney General’s Office’s Civil Division and an integral part of the litigation team defending the pending challenge to Vermont’s genetically-engineered food labeling law.”

By Ayla Yersel Vermont Business MagazineA new urgent care clinic, Clear Choice MD, opened its new office in St. Albans on Wednesday, June 24, as part of the company’s broader expansion into Vermont.

This is the company’s second big opening in Vermont in one month. Clear Choice MD opened its first Vermont office in Berlin in early June, and plans to expand its offices to Rutland, Burlington and Brattleboro later this year, as well as into Maine and upstate New York, said Clear Choice MD founder Marcus Hampers.

The clinic, which is open from 7 am to 7 pm, seven days a week, offers “less costly, more convenient” care to the people of Vermont, Hampers said.

Dr. Marcus Hampers cuts the ribbon at the opening of Clear Choice MD's St. Albans office. Image: Clear Choice MD

Efficiency Vermont, in partnership with Green Mountain Power (GMP) and cloud software provider Opower, today announced plans to deploy a first-of-its-kind residential peak energy savings pilot program to customers in GMP service territory. The program is designed to empower customers save energy and money during hot summer days when the customers’ demand for and the utility’s cost for energy is particularly high. Reducing summer peak demand helps reduce the need for additional power from the most costly and polluting power plants and eases the burden on Vermont’s electricity system.

Vermont PBS, Vermont’s statewide public television network, will christen the launch of its second HD channel, Vermont PBS Plus, with the broadcast premiere of the epic new film,Freedom & Unity: The Vermont Movie July 19. Several years in the making, The Vermont Movie is a six-part, 8-hour compilation of the work of four dozen Vermont filmmakers. It explores the state’s iconoclastic spirit through a thematic lens, rather than a chronological history. In so doing, it offers an intriguing new approach to telling Vermont’s story.

The film premieres on Vermont PBS Plus over six consecutive nights, Monday, July 14 through Saturday, July 19, at 8 p.m. Each nightly installment will be followed by a short interview segment with several of the filmmakers.

A Champlain College proposal to use advanced networks and gigabit internet connections to enhance public safety and speed up cyber forensic investigations earned the top public safety award at the 2014 US Ignite Application Summit in Silicon Valley. The plan, entitled “Cyber Security as a Service,” would utilize gigabit access available in Burlington Vermont and the resources of the BTV Ignite / U.S. Ignite initiative to effectively expedite digital forensic processes and enhance public safety.

Jonathan Rajewski, assistant professor of Digital Forensics at Champlain College, and director of the Leahy Center for Digital Investigation (LCDI), presented the plan at the three-day conference in Sunnydale, CA, and outlined its potential benefits.

Consistent with other demographic information, the US Census has released a report indicating that Vermont trends below the US average in several key birth metrics. Vermont has been one of the slowest growing states by population in the nation and was the only state to lose population between 2011 and 2012. The Census report describes the fertility patterns of women in the United States, patterns which have changed sig­nificantly over time. The average number of children ever born has dropped from more than three children per woman in 1976 to about two children per woman in 2012. Recent years have also seen drops in adolescent childbearing and increases in non-marital births.

Leaders of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) System Council T-9 and Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1400 have scheduled a strike authorization vote for July 11-13 to take place across the FairPoint service area, according to a statement released Tuesday. The two unions represent nearly 2,000 employees of FairPoint Communications across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Their contracts expire on August 2 and union representatives have been in negotiations with management since April 25.

“The doctor will see you now” has a whole new meaning in Bennington. Southwestern Vermont Medical Center is now offering a high-tech telemedicine program that allows patients to be seen by Dartmouth-Hitchcock (D-H) specialists without having to drive two hours to Lebanon, NH. Thanks to a partnership with the D-H Center for Telehealth, several SVMC rheumatology patients are now receiving care via telemedicine, using real-time video for their medical appointments. During the inaugural round of virtual appointments in late June, D-H rheumatologist Daniel Albert, MD, had video consults with more than a dozen SVMC patients.

For patients whose conditions are more complex, Albert makes twice-monthly visits to SVMC to see patients in person.

“I think this hybrid model of me going to Bennington intermittently and doing telemedicine intermittently is absolutely the right model,” says Albert.

by Morgan True vtdigger.org Vermont’s second largest hospital says its rates are likely to grow by 8.4 percent next fiscal year, because payments from government programs that cover health care services aren’t keeping up with inflation.In a letter to the 1,100 employees of Rutland Regional Medical Center, CEO Tom Huebner said the hospital board recently approved a fiscal year 2015 budget, which includes a 2.9 percent increase in spending. “Even with our costs only going up 2.9 percent, our rate – our prices – will have to go up 8.4 percent,” Huebner wrote. “Medicare and Medicaid are only giving us about a 1 percent increase, so we have to make up for this by charging our commercial payers (Blue Cross, MVP, etc.) more.”

by Morgan True vtdigger.org There are thousands of inconsistencies in the information Vermonters provided to enroll in health insurance through the state exchange, according to a federal audit. That could mean hundreds, or even thousands, of Vermonters who received tax credits for their premiums or subsidies to lower their out-of-pocket costs could find they owe money at tax time. A report from the Inspector General of the federal Health and Human Services Department released Tuesday found that the federal and state exchanges failed to properly check applicants’ eligibility for coverage and subsidies. Federal investigators found exchanges were mostly unable to reconcile inconsistencies between the information people provided and government data on income, citizenship and other criteria.