# DigiGone: Who Owns the Encrypted Doctor at Sea, and Who Benefits DigiGone's encrypted telemedicine kits run on standard AES, a wall of trademarks, and a veteran-owned federal set-aside. Here is who owns the doctor in the box at sea, and who benefits. Author: J.A. Watte Published: July 21, 2026 Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/digigone-who-owns-telemedicine-at-sea/ --- *This piece is reported from public records: the Florida Division of Corporations register, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the federal contracting system, the ILO Maritime Labour Convention, and bylined maritime trade press, plus DigiGone's own website. Where a claim rests only on the company's own marketing, I say so. Where a widely repeated number or name could not be confirmed against a primary source, I flag it rather than repeat it. Nothing here alleges wrongdoing. The point is to show how one small proprietary vendor built the shape of an incumbent in a market that a treaty created, and to be honest about who gains from that shape.* A deckhand goes down with crushing chest pain three days out from any port, on a ship with no doctor aboard. That is not a rare scene. It is the ordinary condition of most of the merchant fleet, and the law knows it. So somewhere on that ship there is a locked plastic case, and inside the case is a tablet, a blood pressure cuff, an electrocardiogram, a pulse oximeter, and a camera, and the tablet dials a doctor over a satellite link at a data rate thinner than a fax. On a lot of those ships and yachts, the case says DigiGone on it. The question worth asking is not whether the box works. By every account it works. The question is who owns the box, what makes it proprietary, and who collects when a frightened crew opens it. That is a cleaner story than the marketing, and most of it is on the public record if you go and read it. ## Who owns it Start with the corporate skeleton, because the brand name hides it. "DigiGone" is a trademark, not a company. The company is **Diginonymous, LLC**, a Florida limited liability company filed on April 24, 2007, with an effective date of April 25, 2007, and still in active status on the Florida Division of Corporations register (document L07000043576, [Florida Division of Corporations](https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/SearchResults/EntityName/DIGINONYMOUS,%20LLC/Page1)). The 2007 founding the company advertises is real, and you can see it a second way: the DIGIGONE word mark claims a first use in commerce of April 1, 2007 ([USPTO TSDR, DIGIGONE](https://tsdr.uspto.gov/statusview/sn85751448)). The principal address is a single building at 8084 118th Avenue North in Largo, Florida. The owner is Mike Dunleavy. That is not just a self-description on a LinkedIn page. A bylined feature in Power & Motoryacht, "Medical Care at Sea," names "Mike Dunleavy, president and owner of DigiGone Remote Communication Systems" ([Power & Motoryacht, October 26, 2017](https://powerandmotoryacht.com/voyaging/medical-care-at-sea/)). The company presents itself, on its own about page, as a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business established in 2007 and headquartered in Largo ([DigiGone, About](https://www.digigone.com/about)). That veteran-owned framing is the load-bearing fact of the whole business, and I will come back to why. One more thread ties the name to the metal. The only patents assigned to this company are two design patents on the ornamental shape of a rugged carrying case, and they list the inventor as "Richard M. Dunleavy" ([USD845626, Google Patents](https://patents.google.com/patent/USD845626S1/en)). The plainest reading is that the man who goes by Mike is legally Richard Michael Dunleavy, but I could not confirm from a primary record that the patent inventor and the public founder are the same person, so I leave it as what it is: a name on a patent that matches the family name on the door. ## What the box actually is DigiGone sells a family of products, all of them variations on one idea, which is encrypted communication squeezed down to fit a satellite pipe. The flagship line is **digiMed**, a portable telemedicine kit. Around it sit **digiTECH** for secure voice, video, text, and file transfer, **CrewChat** for crew welfare calls home, **digiChat** for video conferencing, **digiView** for remote camera monitoring, and a Safer Seas Act compliance offering. All of that is confirmed on the company's own site ([DigiGone homepage](https://www.digigone.com/)). The kit itself is specific and well documented in the trade press. The top tier, the digiMed "Five Plus," sells for less than twenty thousand dollars and is built around a custom ten-inch quad-core Windows tablet with a built-in webcam and a built-in Wi-Fi router. Bundled with it are a digital blood pressure cuff, a glucose meter, a digital thermometer, an electrocardiogram, a pulse oximeter, a USB macro camera, a USB otoscope, and disposable headsets, with an electronic stethoscope and an ultrasound as options. The readings stream into the company's digiMed Consult dashboard ([Cruising World, April 21, 2021](https://www.cruisingworld.com/story/gear/telemedicine-for-sailors/); [DigiGone, occupational telemedicine](https://www.digigone.com/occupational-telemedicine)). An earlier magazine review put a lower-tier kit at roughly ten thousand dollars plus subscription fees ([Power & Motoryacht](https://powerandmotoryacht.com/voyaging/medical-care-at-sea/)), and the company's own page advertises an entry "Standard" kit under eight thousand dollars with an augmented-reality headset option in place of the tablet ([DigiGone, portable telemedicine kits](https://www.digigone.com/portable-telemedicine-kits)). Here is the part the hardware photos never show. **DigiGone does not employ the doctors.** When a crew member on a digi+Doc plan opens that tablet and starts a video consult, the physician on the other end works for the George Washington University Maritime Medical Access program, not for DigiGone. When the service launched, the company described the clinical side as immediate access to "more than 550 physicians and specialists" at the GWU Medical Faculty, sold as an annual subscription ([The Maritime Executive, June 3, 2013](https://maritime-executive.com/corporate/Diginonymous-Offers-Shipboard-Video-Telemedicine-Initiative-with-the-Maritime-Medical-Access-Program-at-The-George-Washington-University--2013-06-03)). So the product a ship actually buys is three stacked layers, and a reviewer of the award-winning kit said as much: "The costs of the DigiMed kit, Digigone service contract, and MMA service contract all add up" ([Panbo](https://panbo.com/digigone-digimed-telemedicine-kits-more-pittman-innovation-award-winners/)). DigiGone owns the middle layer, the encrypted pipe and the box. The hardware is partly other people's parts. The doctors are a university's. ## What makes it proprietary, and what does not This is the center of the thing, so it is worth being precise, because the honest answer is more interesting than "it's secret." The encryption is not proprietary. DigiGone is clear about this on its own technical page: the cipher is the NIST-approved Rijndael 256-bit AES algorithm, the same standard block cipher that protects ordinary banking and government traffic, applied to packets moving to and from the company's servers ([DigiGone, digiTECH](https://www.digigone.com/digitech)). There is no home-grown mystery algorithm here, and that is to the company's credit, because home-grown crypto is how amateurs get people killed. The homepage layers on the usual compliance language, "256-bit AES end-to-end encryption," "CMMC Level 1 Compliant," and "NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 controls" ([DigiGone homepage](https://www.digigone.com/)), though CMMC Level 1 is a self-attested tier, and no third-party audit or certificate is posted to back any of it. So if the math is standard, where does "proprietary" live? It lives in the architecture and the packaging, which is the more durable kind of moat. Traffic is brokered through DigiGone's own "Secured Proxy Servers." Bandwidth is governed by a feature the company calls Bandwidth Select, which throttles a session between 40 and 500 Kbps, or as low as 6 to 8 Kbps for audio only ([DigiGone, digiTECH](https://www.digigone.com/digitech)). The kit ships as a custom tablet running DigiGone's own apps, and the whole point is that the pieces are tuned to each other. The company advertises the payoff: a device consult needs about 9 Kbps, video about 25 Kbps, with an ideal of 70 to 90 Kbps, at a time when a normal video call wanted around 400 ([Cruising World](https://www.cruisingworld.com/story/gear/telemedicine-for-sailors/)). That low-bandwidth engineering is the real product. It is also the lock. Once a fleet standardizes on the tablet, the apps, the proxy servers, and the annual competency training the company calls DigiSchool, moving to anyone else means replacing the whole stack ([Yachting, March 24, 2021](https://www.yachtingmagazine.com/story/electronics/telemedicine-at-sea/)). The legal moat is a wall of trademarks, and this is where the ® symbols come from. Diginonymous, LLC owns a cluster of live federal registrations, nearly all of them in the telecommunications class: DIGIGONE (registration 4353429, renewed in December 2023), DIGIVIEW (4496513), DIGICREW (4565565), DIGITECH (4662857), and DIGISTRONG (5901325), with the medical mark DIGIMED (4482849) registered for "telemedicine services" ([USPTO TSDR, DIGIGONE](https://tsdr.uspto.gov/statusview/sn85751448); [DIGIMED](https://tsdr.uspto.gov/statusview/sn86045018)). Two small details tell you something. DIGIMED sits on the Supplemental Register rather than the Principal Register, which is the trademark office's way of saying the word was judged too descriptive to be a strong mark. And in 2019 the networking company Digi International filed for extra time to oppose the DIGISTRONG application before the matter was dropped ([TTABVUE, Diginonymous LLC](https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?corr=DIGINONYMOUS,+LLC)). The wall is real, but it is a wall of names. What the company does not have is a patent on the technology. The only patents on file are those two design patents, and they cover the look of a "remote operations" carrying case, filed in 2017 and granted in 2019 ([USD845626](https://patents.google.com/patent/USD845626S1/en); [USD847503](https://patents.google.com/patent/USD847503S1/en)). Ruggedized luggage, in other words, not encryption and not telemedicine. There is no utility patent under Diginonymous or Dunleavy on the compression, the proxy routing, or the bandwidth control that make the product distinctive. A compression-plus-encryption patent that surfaces near this topic in a search belongs to the University of Texas System, not to DigiGone ([US20150086013A1](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150086013A1/en)). So the "proprietary" claim, read carefully, means three things: registered trademarks on the names, closed-source software kept as a trade secret, and a bundle of custom hardware locked to that software. It does not mean a patented invention that no one else may build. Anyone with the same standard AES and the same commodity medical peripherals could build a competing kit tomorrow. What they could not do overnight is buy the years, the satellite certification, and the veteran-owned status that DigiGone spent since 2007 accumulating. ## The market a treaty built None of this would be a business without a rule that forces ships to carry medical capability, and that rule is the ILO Maritime Labour Convention of 2006, the treaty often called the seafarers' bill of rights. Its Regulation 4.1 and the binding Standard A4.1 require every covered ship to carry a medicine chest, medical equipment, and a medical guide, all inspected by the flag state ([ILO MLC FAQ](https://faqmlc.ilo.org/en/?p=20538)). The convention scales the human requirement by risk. A ship carrying 100 or more people on international voyages longer than three days must carry a qualified doctor. Every other ship, which is most of them, must instead have a crew member trained in medical care or medical first aid to the standards of the international training convention ([ILO MLC FAQ, medical care](https://faqmlc.ilo.org/en/knowledgebase-category/c41/c41b/)). That gap, a ship with no doctor but a legal duty to provide care, is exactly the gap a telemedicine kit fills. The medicine chest itself is standardized by the WHO, ILO, and IMO International Medical Guide for Ships, third edition, 2007 ([referenced in the ILO FAQ](https://faqmlc.ilo.org/en/?p=20538)). The convention entered force in 2013 and now covers well over 96 percent of world shipping tonnage by the flags that have ratified it ([ILO, what MLC is and does](https://www.ilo.org/international-labour-standards/maritime-labour-convention-2006-0/mlc-2006-what-it-and-what-it-does)). Now the twist that the sales brochures never lead with. The same convention that creates the demand also guarantees a free alternative. Standard A4.1 requires each flag state to run a prearranged system so that medical advice by radio or satellite, including specialist advice, is available 24 hours a day and, in the treaty's own words, free of charge to all ships irrespective of the flag they fly ([ILO MLC FAQ, medical care](https://faqmlc.ilo.org/en/knowledgebase-category/c41/c41b/)). That promise is delivered in practice by national Telemedical Assistance Services. Italy's Centro Internazionale Radio Medico has done exactly this since April 7, 1935, at no cost, for seafarers of any nationality anywhere in the world ([CIRM](https://www.cirm-tmas.it/)). So the baseline that every ship is entitled to, a doctor's voice by radio or satellite in an emergency, is already free. What DigiGone sells is not access to a doctor. It is a better-looking, encrypted, video-and-vitals version of a thing the law already provides for nothing. One honest caveat that cuts against the company's own customer list: the Maritime Labour Convention explicitly excludes fishing vessels, warships, and naval auxiliaries ([ILO, what MLC is and does](https://www.ilo.org/international-labour-standards/maritime-labour-convention-2006-0/mlc-2006-what-it-and-what-it-does)). DigiGone markets to fishing companies and to the military. Those segments are not driven by MLC A4.1 at all. They are driven by something else, and that something else is the second engine of this business. ## The set-aside channel, which is where the veteran status pays The land side of DigiGone, the remote clinics, the mining camps, the "occupational telemedicine," and above all the government and military work, runs on a different track than the maritime kit. It runs on federal contracting, and the veteran-owned label is the ticket to ride. The company is set up for it. Its federal registration lists it as Diginonymous, LLC in Largo, Florida, with a Unique Entity ID and a CAGE code, and its System for Award Management profile carries both Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business and Veteran-Owned Business designations ([HigherGov awardee profile](https://www.highergov.com/awardee/diginonymous-llc-13230609/)). That status is worth real money because of how the government buys. The Veterans Benefit Act of 2003 lets agencies steer contracts to service-disabled veteran-owned firms ([15 U.S.C. 657f](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/657f)). A contracting officer can set a requirement aside for these firms whenever two or more are likely to bid, the so-called rule of two, and can hand one of them a sole-source award without competition up to 8.5 million dollars for a manufacturing requirement and 5 million for everything else ([FAR subpart 19.14](https://www.acquisition.gov/far/subpart-19.14)). Congress keeps pushing more dollars toward the category. The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2024 raised the government-wide goal for prime contracting with these firms from 3 percent to 5 percent ([CRS, IN12313](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12313)), and agencies were already clearing the old bar, sending 4.57 percent of prime dollars to service-disabled veteran-owned firms in fiscal 2022 ([CRS, IN12018](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12018)). For a medical and communications vendor, the richest door is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which by law puts these firms first. Under the VA's Veterans First program, a contracting officer must consider a service-disabled veteran-owned set-aside ahead of every other category, ahead of the 8(a) program, HUBZone, and women-owned firms, and the VA has poured more than a fifth of its prime contracting dollars into these companies in a single year ([VAAR subpart 819.70](https://www.acquisition.gov/vaar/subpart-819.70-va-veterans-first-contracting-program); [Govology](https://govology.com/agency-specific-small-disadvantaged-business-goals-now-in-effect/)). The gate on all of it tightened recently. Verification of veteran-owned status moved from the VA to the Small Business Administration on January 1, 2023, and simple self-certification has been phased out, so a firm now needs a formal SBA certification to win these set-asides at all ([SBA Veteran Small Business Certification](https://veterans.certify.sba.gov/)). That is the "who benefits" engine in its clearest form. A veteran-owned small business selling a proprietary, hard-to-switch system into a protected federal channel is not doing anything improper. It is doing exactly what the program was designed to encourage. It is worth saying plainly, though, that the payoff is structural, not something I could see landing. Searching the public federal award trackers, I found no populated contract dollars for Diginonymous at all. The aggregator shows the firm registered, shows a "most recent award" date, and then shows empty award tables, which is a contradiction it does not explain ([HigherGov](https://www.highergov.com/awardee/diginonymous-llc-13230609/)). The direct government databases would not open for me. So the honest state is "no federal awards located," which is not the same as proof there are none. The channel is real and it is valuable. Whether and how much has flowed through it for this particular firm, the public record I could reach does not show. ## Is DigiGone an incumbent? The company reaches for incumbent language. Its about page calls DigiGone a "global leader" whose products are "trusted by government healthcare institutions" and "U.S. and foreign military, special operations, and intelligence organizations" ([DigiGone, About](https://www.digigone.com/about)). Read that as what it is: marketing. Not one agency, contract number, or named vessel operator appears anywhere on the page or anywhere I could find off it. The dedicated military page names no customer at all. The "award-winning" label, chased down, resolves to one genuine third-party award, SAIL magazine's 2015 Pittman Innovation Award ([Panbo](https://panbo.com/digigone-digimed-telemedicine-kits-more-pittman-innovation-award-winners/)). That is a real award and a nice one. It is not market dominance. The fair assessment is more textured. DigiGone is a legitimate niche vendor, not the dominant player in maritime or remote telemedicine, and its own trade coverage says so by listing it in the same breath as its competitors. A single Trade Only feature names Medical Support Offshore, Praxes, George Washington Maritime Medical Access, and MedAire alongside it ([Trade Only Today, August 1, 2020](https://www.tradeonlytoday.com/post-type-feature/the-virtual-doctor-is-always-in)). The competitive field runs in three lanes. DigiGone's lane is the bought kit, hardware plus encryption plus a resold doctor subscription. A second and larger lane is the pure medical-services subscription with a 24-hour physician network: MedAire, which is part of International SOS, VIKAND with its OneHealth service, Future Care, and Praxes, which has run emergency telemedicine with Canadian physicians since 1997 ([VIKAND](https://vikand.com/onehealth-by-vikand/); [Praxes](https://praxes.ca/about/)). In that same 2020 reporting, MedAire and Praxes plans ran under a thousand dollars a year, a fraction of DigiGone's kit price ([Trade Only Today](https://www.tradeonlytoday.com/post-type-feature/the-virtual-doctor-is-always-in)). And the third lane, underneath both, is the free national radio-medico service the treaty guarantees. So the truthful answer to the incumbency question is a split one. In the broad market, DigiGone is one option among several, sitting above a free public baseline, which is the opposite of a monopoly. Within its own narrow niche, though, the encrypted, low-bandwidth, veteran-owned kit sold into government and remote-industrial buyers, it has assembled the classic furniture of an incumbent: an early start in 2007, a satellite-operator blessing when Thuraya certified and began distributing the system in 2013 ([Via Satellite, September 27, 2013](https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2013/09/27/digigone-receives-approval-for-use-with-thuraya-terminals/); [Thuraya, digiMed](https://www.thuraya.com/en/solutions/telemedicine/digimed/)), a wall of trademarks, a stack that is expensive to leave, an annual mandatory training that keeps customers inside the ecosystem, and a set-aside status that quietly reorders who a federal buyer is allowed to consider first. It is not an incumbent because it won the market. It is incumbent-shaped because it built the switching costs and stood in the protected lane early. ## Who benefits, added up Follow the money the box collects and the beneficiaries are easy to name. The owner benefits, the way any founder of a specialized small business benefits, from a company built on a durable position rather than a price war. The satellite partners benefit, because a telemedicine kit is a reason to sell airtime, and Thuraya put DigiGone into its portfolio precisely so its terminals would have one more thing to do ([Thuraya](https://www.thuraya.com/en/solutions/telemedicine/digimed/)). George Washington University's Maritime Medical Access program benefits, because it collects a recurring clinical subscription for the doctors DigiGone routes to but does not employ ([The Maritime Executive](https://maritime-executive.com/corporate/Diginonymous-Offers-Shipboard-Video-Telemedicine-Initiative-with-the-Maritime-Medical-Access-Program-at-The-George-Washington-University--2013-06-03)). The federal set-aside channel benefits the firm structurally, moving it to the front of the line for a slice of contracting dollars Congress keeps enlarging ([CRS, IN12313](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12313)). Vessel operators benefit in a particular way that is easy to miss: they are buying visible compliance and a liability story, a box they can point an inspector or a lawyer to, on top of whatever medicine actually happens. And the crew benefit, genuinely. This is the part that keeps the piece honest in the other direction. A frightened, injured worker a thousand miles from a hospital gets a specialist's face on a screen and a set of real vitals moving to that specialist over a link that would choke an ordinary video call. That is worth something the free voice-only service cannot always match. The design that produces it is legitimate engineering. The critique in this article is not that the box is bad. It is that a thing sold as "the encrypted telemedicine leader trusted by intelligence organizations" is, on the record, a Florida LLC with a wall of trademarks and no patent on its core, reselling a university's doctors over a standard cipher, into a market a treaty created and a set-aside protects. All of that can be true at once, and the crew can still be glad the case is aboard. That is the pattern this site keeps finding. The value in a business like this is not the invention. It is the position: own a name, own a locked stack, stand in a protected lane, and let a mandate downstream do the selling for you. It is the same move, in miniature and at sea, as the ones mapped in [The Toll Booth series](/blog/the-toll-booth-index/), and it is the argument of [The W-2 Trap](https://thew2trap.com/), which is that the durable money goes to whoever owns the thing everyone else has to pass through, not to whoever works the hardest passing through it. ## Fact-check notes and sources The corporate, trademark, patent, regulatory, and federal-contracting facts are from primary registers and official texts. The kit specifications, pricing, awards, and partnerships are from bylined maritime trade press and, where noted, DigiGone's own site. Anything resting only on the company's marketing is labeled as such below. - **The legal entity, ownership, and 2007 founding:** Diginonymous, LLC, Florida document L07000043576, filed April 24, 2007, active, principal address 8084 118th Avenue North, Largo, FL, per the [Florida Division of Corporations](https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/SearchResults/EntityName/DIGINONYMOUS,%20LLC/Page1). The DIGIGONE mark's claimed first use in commerce of April 1, 2007 corroborates the founding year ([USPTO TSDR](https://tsdr.uspto.gov/statusview/sn85751448)). Ownership by "Mike Dunleavy, president and owner" is from a third party, [Power & Motoryacht](https://powerandmotoryacht.com/voyaging/medical-care-at-sea/), not only the company's site. **Name caveat:** the two design patents list the inventor as "Richard M. Dunleavy" ([USD845626](https://patents.google.com/patent/USD845626S1/en)); the most likely reading is that the founder's legal name is Richard Michael Dunleavy and he goes by Mike, but I could not confirm from a primary record that the two names are the same person. - **Service-disabled veteran-owned status:** the company self-describes as an SDVOSB ([About](https://www.digigone.com/about)), and its federal SAM profile carries SDVOSB and VOSB designations per the [HigherGov aggregator](https://www.highergov.com/awardee/diginonymous-llc-13230609/). This confirms the firm asserts the status in the federal system. It is not an independent verification of the underlying VA or SBA service-disabled determination, and I could not confirm whether the firm holds a current SBA certification versus a legacy self-certification. - **Product line, kit contents, and pricing:** product roster from the [DigiGone homepage](https://www.digigone.com/). The Five Plus kit at "less than $20,000" with the ten-inch quad-core Windows tablet and the full device list is from [Cruising World, April 21, 2021](https://www.cruisingworld.com/story/gear/telemedicine-for-sailors/), the [DigiGone occupational-telemedicine page](https://www.digigone.com/occupational-telemedicine), and [Yachting, March 24, 2021](https://www.yachtingmagazine.com/story/electronics/telemedicine-at-sea/). The roughly $10,000 kit-plus-subscription figure is from [Power & Motoryacht, October 26, 2017](https://powerandmotoryacht.com/voyaging/medical-care-at-sea/), and the under-$8,000 Standard tier is the company's own ([portable telemedicine kits](https://www.digigone.com/portable-telemedicine-kits)). Prices come from different years and should be reconfirmed with the vendor before being treated as current. - **The doctors are George Washington University's, not DigiGone's:** the digi+Doc clinical service resells access to the GWU Maritime Medical Access program, described at launch as "more than 550 physicians and specialists," on an annual subscription ([The Maritime Executive, June 3, 2013](https://maritime-executive.com/corporate/Diginonymous-Offers-Shipboard-Video-Telemedicine-Initiative-with-the-Maritime-Medical-Access-Program-at-The-George-Washington-University--2013-06-03)). The three-layer cost structure (kit, DigiGone contract, MMA contract) is confirmed by a [Panbo](https://panbo.com/digigone-digimed-telemedicine-kits-more-pittman-innovation-award-winners/) review. - **Encryption and the closed architecture:** the standard NIST-approved Rijndael 256-bit AES cipher, the Secured Proxy Servers, and the Bandwidth Select control (40 to 500 Kbps, 6 to 8 Kbps audio only) are stated on [DigiGone's digiTECH page](https://www.digigone.com/digitech). Bandwidth figures of about 9 Kbps audio and 25 Kbps video are from [Cruising World](https://www.cruisingworld.com/story/gear/telemedicine-for-sailors/). "Bandwidth Select" carries a common-law trademark symbol on the site, not a confirmed federal registration. The CMMC Level 1 and NIST SP 800-171 statements on the [homepage](https://www.digigone.com/) are self-attested, with no third-party audit cited. - **Trademarks and patents:** live federal registrations owned by Diginonymous, LLC include DIGIGONE (Reg. 4353429), DIGIMED (Reg. 4482849, on the Supplemental Register, for "telemedicine services"), DIGIVIEW (4496513), DIGICREW (4565565), DIGITECH (4662857), and DIGISTRONG (5901325), verified on [USPTO TSDR](https://tsdr.uspto.gov/statusview/sn85751448) and the [TTABVUE docket](https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?corr=DIGINONYMOUS,+LLC). The only patents are two design patents on a carrying case, [USD845626](https://patents.google.com/patent/USD845626S1/en) and [USD847503](https://patents.google.com/patent/USD847503S1/en). No utility patent on the encryption, compression, or telemedicine technology exists under this owner; the similarly themed [US20150086013A1](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150086013A1/en) belongs to the University of Texas System. - **The regulatory driver, and the free alternative:** ILO Maritime Labour Convention 2006, Standard A4.1, requires the medicine chest, the doctor-or-trained-crew rule, and 24-hour radio or satellite medical advice "free of charge to all ships irrespective of the flag they fly" ([ILO MLC FAQ](https://faqmlc.ilo.org/en/?p=20538); [ILO MLC medical-care FAQ](https://faqmlc.ilo.org/en/knowledgebase-category/c41/c41b/)). MLC coverage, entry into force, and the exclusion of fishing vessels and warships are from the [ILO overview](https://www.ilo.org/international-labour-standards/maritime-labour-convention-2006-0/mlc-2006-what-it-and-what-it-does). The free national service is exemplified by Italy's [CIRM](https://www.cirm-tmas.it/), which has operated at no cost worldwide since 1935. - **The set-aside mechanism:** the program originates in the [Veterans Benefit Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 657f)](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/657f); sole-source ceilings of $8.5 million (manufacturing) and $5 million (other) and the rule of two are at [FAR subpart 19.14](https://www.acquisition.gov/far/subpart-19.14); the government-wide goal rose from 3 to 5 percent under the FY2024 NDAA ([CRS IN12313](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12313)); the FY2022 achievement of 4.57 percent is from [CRS IN12018](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12018); the VA's first-priority ordering is at [VAAR subpart 819.70](https://www.acquisition.gov/vaar/subpart-819.70-va-veterans-first-contracting-program); the shift to SBA certification is at the [SBA VetCert program](https://veterans.certify.sba.gov/). **No populated federal contract awards for Diginonymous were located** in the public trackers reachable for this piece; that is an absence of found records, not proof of zero. - **Incumbency, awards, and competitors:** the Thuraya certification and distribution are from [Via Satellite, September 27, 2013](https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2013/09/27/digigone-receives-approval-for-use-with-thuraya-terminals/) and [Thuraya's own page](https://www.thuraya.com/en/solutions/telemedicine/digimed/). The 2015 SAIL Pittman Innovation Award is from [Panbo](https://panbo.com/digigone-digimed-telemedicine-kits-more-pittman-innovation-award-winners/). The competitive field and the sub-$1,000-a-year MedAire and Praxes pricing are from [Trade Only Today, August 1, 2020](https://www.tradeonlytoday.com/post-type-feature/the-virtual-doctor-is-always-in), with competitor detail from [VIKAND](https://vikand.com/onehealth-by-vikand/) and [Praxes](https://praxes.ca/about/). The "global leader" and "trusted by military, special operations, and intelligence organizations" claims are self-reported on the [About page](https://www.digigone.com/about) and are not corroborated by any named agency, contract, or third party. ## Related reading - [The Toll Booth: the full index](/blog/the-toll-booth-index/): the map of who collects rent on the things you cannot avoid, and where a proprietary, mandate-fed vendor fits in it. - [How Certificate-of-Need Holders Get Paid](/blog/how-certificate-of-need-holders-are-paid/): the same move on land, where a regulatory approval, not a patent, is the moat that keeps competitors out of healthcare. - [How Domain Registries Get Paid](/blog/how-domain-registries-are-paid/): a cleaner example of owning the single thing everyone has to route through, with a price cap standing in for competition. - [The Built to Be Bought Series](/blog/built-to-be-bought-series-index/): the second-career version, how a veteran-owned, cleared small business is assembled on a set-aside and sold. - [The Armed Forces Retirement Home](/blog/armed-forces-retirement-home/): the other side of the veteran-and-the-government relationship, a benefit the toll booth owner builds rather than a business built beside it. *This post is informational and journalistic, not legal, financial, medical, or procurement advice. It reports on a company and a named individual using public records and published trade coverage, which is nominative fair use, and it alleges no wrongdoing. Statutes, fee schedules, registrations, and prices change, and several figures are flagged as company-reported or as dated snapshots, so verify current data at the cited primary sources before relying on any of it. No affiliation with DigiGone, Diginonymous, LLC, or any company named here is implied.* --- Canonical HTML: https://jwatte.com/blog/digigone-who-owns-telemedicine-at-sea/ RSS: https://jwatte.com/feed.xml JSON Feed: https://jwatte.com/feed.json Hero image: https://jwatte.com/images/digigone-who-owns-telemedicine-at-sea.webp