The Financial Crisis

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA

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And – Cultural Capture

j kwak

By
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A few years ago, while still in law school, I was invited to write a chapter for a Tobin Project book on regulatory capture. It was a bit intimidating, being part of a project that included luminaries like David Moss, Dan Carpenter, Luigi Zingales, Richard Posner, Tino Cuellar, and the deans of two of the best law schools in the country.

I was asked to write something about an idea that I had slipped into 13 Bankers, almost in passing, about the cultural prestige of the financial industry and the political and regulatory benefits the industry derived from that prestige. My chapter turned into a discussion of the various mechanisms by which status and social networks can influence regulators, creating the equivalent of regulatory capture even without traditional materialist incentives (cash under the table, promises of future jobs, etc.).

Two weeks ago, an investigation by ProPublica and This American Life illustrated the culture of deference, risk aversion, and general sucking-upitude among New York Fed bank examiners that effectively resulted in the capture of regulators by the banks they were supposed to be regulating. As David Beim wrote in a confidential report about the New York Fed, the core problem was “what the culture expected of people and what the culture induced people to do.”

I wrote about the story for the Atlantic and referred to my book chapter, but at the time the chapter was not available for free on the Internet (at least not legally). The good people at the Tobin Project have since put it up on the book’s website, from which you can download it (legally!). Note that they are only allowed to put up one chapter at a time and they rotate them, so this is a limited-time offer.

Link: Cultural Capture and the Financial Crisis

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More: http://jameskwak.net/

Conclusion

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Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com

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How Secure Is Your Password – Doctor?

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA

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Tips on using strong passwords 

[Securing yourself from a world of hackers]

By Shahid N. Shah MS

Shahid N. Shah MS

What is at Risk?

Here are some specific tools, gadgets, cloud servers, EHRs and other reasons you should secure your PWs:

  • Fax Server – a fax server allows you to centrally manage all incoming and outgoing faxes. Since most medical practices live on fax, this is one of the fastest investments you can recoup.
  • Shared drives – start using shared drives either using your existing software or you can purchase inexpensive “network disks” for a few hundred dollars to share business forms, online directories, reports, scanned charts, and many other files.
  • Online backups and Internet PACS storage – there are online tools like JungleDisk.com that allow you to store gigabytes of encrypted data into the Internet “cloud” for just a few dollars a month.
  • E-mail (beware of HIPAA, though) – internal office messaging and email is a great place to start. If you haven’t started your office automation journey here you should. If you’re going to use it for patient communications you’ll need to make sure you have patient approvals and appropriate encryption. If you’re on Gmail today and you want to have customers immediately be able to communicate with you on Gmail, that’s generally HIPAA compliant because communications between two Gmail accounts stays within the Google data center and is not sent unencrypted over the Internet.
  • E-Prescribing – e-prescribing is a great place to start your automation journey because it’s a fast way to realize how much slower the digital process is in capturing clinical data. If e-prescribing alone makes you slower in your job, EMRs will likely affect you even more. If you’re productive with e-prescribing then EMRs in general will make you more productive too.
  • Office Online and Google Apps (scheduling, document sharing) – Google and Microsoft® have some very nice online tools for managing contacts (your patients are contacts), scheduling (appointments), dirt simple document management, and getting everyone in the office “on the same page”. Before you jump into full-fledged EMRs see if these basic free tools can do the job for you.
  • Modular clinical groupware – this is a new category of software that allows you to collaborate with colleagues on your most time-consuming or most-needy patients and leave the remainder of them as-is. By automating what’s taking the most of your time you don’t worry about the majority of patients who aren’t.
  • Patient registry and CCR bulletin boards – if you’re just looking for basic patient population management and not detailed office automation then patient registries and CCR databases are a great start. These don’t help with workflow but they do manage patient summaries.
  • Document imaging – scanning and storing your paper documents is something that affects everyone; all scanners come with some basic imaging software that you can use for free. Once you’re good at scanning and paper digitization you can move to “medical grade” document managements that can improve productivity even more.

eHRs

  • Clinical content repository (CMS) – open source systems like DrupalModules.com and Joomla.org do a great job of content management and they can be adapted to do clinical content management.
  • Electronic lab reporting – if labs are taking up most of your time, you can automate that pretty easily with web-based lab reporting systems.
  • Electronic transcription – if clinical note taking is taking most of your time, you can automate that by using electronic transcribing.
  • Speech recognition – another “point solution” to helping with capturing clinical notes; you can get a system up and running for under $250.
  • Instant Messaging (IM) – IM gives you the ability to connect directly with multiple rooms within your office using free software; if you want, you can also connect with patients and other physicians during work hours.

How to avoid the most common and dangerous passwords?

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password

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Conclusion

Your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, URLs and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.

Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com

OUR OTHER PRINT BOOKS AND RELATED INFORMATION SOURCES:

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