Question 18 (a)
The Cleveland Clinic (“Cleveland Clinic”), founded in 1921 and headquartered in Cleveland Ohio, today is a $5 billion international medical center with almost 1,000 doctors, offering world-class hospital and outpatient care in virtually every medical specialty. Ranked each year as one of the top five hospital systems in the United States, the Cleveland Clinic is recognized for its achievements in demonstrating unusually high expertise across multiple medical and healthcare related specialties.
The Cleveland Clinic is currently ranked in numerous areas of medical specialty, including rankings of number 1 in Cardiology and Heart Surgery; number 2 in Nephrology; number 2 in Urology; number 2 in Gastroenterology; number 3 in Rheumatology; number 3 in Pulmonology; number 4 in Orthopedics; number 4 in Cardiology; number 5 in Diabetes and Endocrinology; number 6 in Neurology and Neurosurgery; number 7 in Geriatrics; number 7 in Pediatrics: Neurology and Neurosurgery; and number 9 in Cancer. The Cleveland Clinic has received such high rankings on a consistent basis.
Cleveland Clinic’s executive management team includes Dr. Toby Cosgrove (Chief Executive Officer and President of the Cleveland Clinic) and Dr. C. Martin Harris (Chief Information Officer of the Cleveland Clinic).
Dr. Cosgrove presides over a $5 billion healthcare system comprised of the Cleveland Clinic, nine community hospitals, 15 family health and ambulatory surgery centers, Cleveland Clinic Florida, the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, Nevada, Cleveland Clinic Toronto, and Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. His leadership has emphasized patient care and patient experience, including the re-organization of clinical services into patient-centered, organ and disease-based institutes. He has launched major wellness initiatives for patients, employees and communities.
Dr. Harris, a frequent presenter at national meetings on health care and technology, is on the advisory board of the Association of American Medical Collegesʹ Better Health 2010 committee and is a judge for the case studies in medicine for The Computerworld Smithsonian Honors Program. He is also a member of the American Medical Informatics Association and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.
The Cleveland Clinic firmly believes that establishment of a .MED top-level domain, imbued with the principles established by the Cleveland Clinic, will promote competition, consumer trust and consumer choice. Towards this end, the Cleveland Clinic has engaged Medistry LLC (“Medistry”) to apply for, obtain and operate the .MED gTLD under guidance and direction from the Cleveland Clinic. Medistry is owned and operated by CC Web Solutions, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Cleveland Clinic, and Second Genistry LLC, which includes the same management team which owns and operates the .JOBS sponsored gTLD. Both Drs. Cosgrove and Harris serve in the formal capacity of Executive Advisors to Medistry.
The mission⁄purpose of .MED is to perform as a new gTLD consistently with the mission and purpose of the Cleveland Clinic. The mission of the Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit multispecialty academic medical center, is to integrate clinical and hospital care with research and education. Under the stewardship of the Cleveland Clinic, the .MED gTLD will aim to serve as a source identifier that accomplishes integrating clinical and hospital care with research and education in a digital world, providing a trusted name space wherein users can come to find trusted sources for medical information.
Towards fulfilling this mission⁄purpose, domain registrations in .MED will not be real-time, but instead will be allocated by Requests for Proposals (RFPs) only. RFP applicants will at minimum be required to set forth their qualifications to integrate clinical and hospital care with research and education, and any registration and⁄or use of domain names in .MED will be under terms, policies and guidelines as the Cleveland Clinic so determines in its sole discretion, consistent with the above-stated mission⁄purpose of the .MED gTLD, any applicable ICANN Consensus Policies, ICANN’s registry agreement, any applicable rules of law and Cleveland Clinic-approved guidelines.
The Cleveland Clinic firmly believes that the .MED gTLD, as used to promote the above-stated mission⁄purpose, would provide benefit to Internet users in general. In fulfilling .MED’s mission⁄purpose, the Cleveland Clinic, upon allocation of .MED, intends to explore ways of promoting adoption and use of .MED to fulfill the mission⁄purpose set forth above, and will likely obtain input from a broad range of medical service providers towards investigating many such ways.
One exemplary way the Cleveland Clinic intends to explore is providing geographic, clinical and⁄or other medical-related terms not otherwise reserved from registration and⁄or use for use at the second-level to provide medically-related information in the area associated with the geographic term or the field associated with the clinical⁄medical term. In conjunction with allocation via RFPs, consumer choice is thus promoted by providing an easily accessible and intuitive source for providing medical-related information.
The Cleveland Clinic believes that medical professionals, educators, patients and, generally, consumers associate the Cleveland Clinic with integrating clinical and hospital care with research and education. People have come to trust the care, research and education provided by the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic believes that its stewardship of the .MED gTLD will extend that trust into the DNS namespace for the .MED gTLD, and that such trust would be created in no small part by the Cleveland Clinic’s ability and willingness to protect .MED both through the registration limitations set forth above and compliance with the Cleveland Clinic’s mission. When a consumer visits a .MED domain, she can be assured that the registrant has been reviewed and approved by the Cleveland Clinic, and that any content is consistent with the stated mission⁄purpose of the gTLD.
Medistry will be managed in a highly professional and commercially reasonable manner, consistent with any applicable ICANN Consensus Policies, ICANN’s registry agreement and any applicable rules of law, providing a level of comfort to registrants and Internet users alike as being a gTLD powered by the industry’s leading back end provider (Verisign, Inc.) and backed by a management team already experienced in the operation of a gTLD and with the executive advice of Drs. Cosgrove and Harris.
Medistry pledges to assist ICANN in reviewing the New gTLD Program as specified in section 9.3 of ICANN’s Affirmation of Commitments as such relates to .MED and the materials set forth in this application, including consideration of the extent to which the .MED gTLD has promoted competition, consumer trust and consumer choice, as well as effectiveness of the application and evaluation process for .MED, and all safeguards put in place for .MED to mitigate issues involved in running .MED. |