Law Students

The soon to be Japanese PM learns an important lesson in globalization. Most politicians and corporate leaders bandy about the word globalization and pretend to understand what this word means in an age where the distance between any two points on the network is zero. The Levin Institute poses the following questions for readers to ponder regarding what globalization means:

What Is globalization? Is it the integration of economic, political, and cultural systems across the globe? Or is it Americanization and United States dominance of world affairs? Is globalization a force for economic growth, prosperity, and democratic freedom? Or is it a force for environmental devastation, exploitation of the developing world, and suppression of human rights?

While these questions attempt to get at what passes for conventional wisdom regarding globalization, they all miss the mark. In a world where news travels at the speed of light, you can (and should) expect anything said (or done) in public to be instantly available as front page news (i.e. depending on its relevancy at a particular point in time) everywhere and anywhere. This is a lesson recently learned by a Honduran diplomat, by Yukio Hatoyama, by George Allen, and by countless others.

In short, globalization is mostly about a new public communications grammar and transparency. It is still early in web years and many people that you might otherwise think should be sophisticated enough to "grok" this brave new world, don't.

What does the mean to the healthcare industry as it undergoes transformational reform and nothing short of an electronic revolution? Well, for one thing it should be a wake up call to healthcare executives that privacy and security breaches are likely to make national (and likely international) news. These issues pose radically different regulatory governance issues,and most of the "pain" will come from the ensuing public relations disaster and not from the potentially millions of dollars in fines for non-compliance.

This is not your daddy's healthcare industry! Living in Internet time means that we already left Kansas a couple of lifetimes ago. If you would like more information regarding this changing landscape, sign up for our FREE HITECH/HIPAA Compliance Newsletter. The archived copies of our monthly newsletter are available without a subscription.