Folta to Oversee Professional Group

August 4, 2017

Westfair Communications – University of Connecticut management professor Timothy B. Folta has been elected to a five-year term overseeing the Business Policy and Strategy (BPS) Division of the Academy of Management. The academy is an organization of management educators, with more than 19,000 members in 120 countries. In addition to hosting conferences and supporting research, it publishes six research journals. The BPS division has more than 5,000 members.

Precarious Work: The Need for Flextime Employment Rights and Proposals for Reform

Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, Vol. 37, Issue 1 (2016)

Robert Bird

Millions of Americans are under intense pressure to balance work and family responsibilities. The feeling of overwork is rampant, with nearly half of employees feeling overworked or overwhelmed by their workplace responsibilities. This Article argues for a suite of legal protections that would allow working families, especially single-parent and low-income families, basic access to the rights and protections of flexible work. These protections include amending FLSA rides to better protect non-exempt workers from intrusions into their non-working time, as well as expanding the use of the FMLA to encourage more use of flexible leave. This article also recommends adoption of right-to-request legislation, enabling employees to request a flexible schedule and have that request meaningfully evaluated by their employer without fear of retaliation. Full article.

What Does UConn Offer in Healthcare Information Technology?

August 3, 2017

The University of Connecticut School of Business has developed classes and programs to address the growing intersection of healthcare and technology.

The School of Business is focusing on healthcare and healthcare technology as fundamental issues in the growth of healthcare knowledge. We have developed a Healthcare Informatics & Technology certificate program designed for adult learners who are seeking additional information and/or career advancement related to healthcare. It’s built for entry to mid-level IT staff members employed within healthcare, IT professionals from other industries looking to learn about healthcare, clinicians looking to expand their knowledge of technology, and healthcare business consultants who want to learn more about how technology will affect their industry. Continue Reading

UConn Innovation Quest: CRISPR – X

CTStartup Podcast– You may not have heard of it, but CRISPR (that stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) could change the face of modern medicine as we know it. Many startups are involved in trying to utilize CRISPR to cure diseases, but a couple of college students may have already beaten them to the punch.

UConn students Ryan Englander and Nandan Tumu are developing a way to use CRISPR as a means of fighting off certain kinds of cancers even after they’re developed. Could these two college students find the cancer breakthrough that has eluded modern medicine for so long?

Facebook Group Urges Preservation of Old Stanley Buildings

August 2, 2017

New Britain Herald – When it was announced that Stanley Black & Decker was planning to demolish all nine buildings it owns east of Curtis Street and south of Myrtle Street, some residents celebrated an opportunity revitalize the corner, while others were upset that their beloved city would be losing a bit of its history.

Turning Corporate Compliance into Competitive Advantage

July 31, 2017

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, Vol. 19, No.2 (2017)

Robert Bird, Stephen Park

Compliance is a core concern for corporate governance. Firms devote tremendous amounts of money, personnel, and attention to ensure compliance with regulatory mandates — and yet compliance failures proliferate. This is because the current static and binary view of compliance hinders both efficient compliance by firms and effective regulation by government. Understanding the reality that compliance is both dynamic and driven by efficiency empowers firms to evolve past mere conformance and into wealth maximizing innovation. This Article develops an efficient investment-risk (EIR) model of compliance that captures the tradeoffs between cost and risk, parses the oft-commingled concepts of technical efficiency and allocative efficiency, and enables firms to obtain a competitive advantage through compliance. We also turn our attention to regulators, and highlight how the EIR model can enhance regulatory design, foster regulator-firm cooperation, and advance the mutual goals of business and society. Full article.

What’s On the Horizon for HIT?

July 27, 2017

The four things I see coming down the road for healthcare information technology:

First, the cost of technology is going down. With the cost going down, it enables the second aspect – pervasiveness of medical devices and technology. We’re going to see HIT more and more in different places at different times. The third major aspect is in the tools and methods from other industries. We’re going to see the kinds of innovations that exist in banking, or travel, or manufacturing being used in healthcare. And finally, there’s an issue that we need to address as a society. That’s the idea of data ethics: “Who gets my information, how do they get to use it, and what do I reserve that only I can access?” Continue Reading