Categories
Career Can D0

Internships and How They Help You with Natalia Johnson


 
In this episode of Career Can Do, Mary Ann Faremouth chats with Natalia Johnson, HR Compliance Specialist and HR Assistant at G&A Partners. Natalia is a former employee of Faremouth & Company, where she was an Administrative Assistant. 
 

 
Natalia strongly encourages high-schoolers and college students to get involved in as many extracurriculars, clubs, and organizations as they can. Her experience as part of the organization for her major not only helped her in her job, but also provided a support system and networking skills, which are both incredibly useful. She talks about how she changed her career course and advises listeners on how to do the same.
 
Sometimes people are so afraid of looking like they don’t know something that they just go ahead and do things without asking questions, and the repercussions of their mistakes are often worse than the temporary shame they might have felt if they had just asked for help, Mary Ann comments. She asks Natalia about the growth of her company, and if it can be attributed to people seeing the benefits of using an outsourcing firm.
 
Resources
Faremouth.com
Natalia Johnson on LinkedIn
 
 

Categories
Greetings and Felicitations Understanding Lyme Disease

Understanding Lyme Disease – Episode 3: Treatment and Innovation


 
Tom Fox welcomes back Scott Endicott and Ben Locwin to part 3 of the Understanding Lyme Disease Podcast Series. In this episode, they look at treatment solutions for Lyme disease.
 

 
The Current Lyme Treatment
The current treatment for Lyme disease is more focused on adults. It’s a non innovative approach, however, as Ben points out. The current standard treatment is a 100 milligram dosage of Doxycycline twice per day for 10 to 12 days. Patients will typically get three weeks worth of prescription. For children, they are prescribed Amoxicillin as they can’t tolerate Doxycycline. This dosage would be 50 milligrams, three times a day. The current treatment protocols are inadequate for the population who have Lyme disease symptoms, Ben tells Tom. Both the infectious disease community and the academic research and physician community are holding fast to their own views on how Lyme disease is to be treated and what works and what doesn’t. This poses a challenge, Scott remarks. 
 
The Need For Innovation
“The Health and Human Services (HHS) just put together a working group that is actually looking at emergent innovative approaches, and some of those innovative approaches are ones that the Lyme specialists have been using for many years, like PICC lyme antibiotics, essentially intravenous antibiotics in order to arrest very accelerated symptoms and symptoms that have taken patients to a place where there needs to be massive changes to their health or things are going to continue… to just get worse,” he adds. This kind of innovation needs to be more normalized, and clinical experts need to remove themselves from their old school way of thinking. When new data is coming in from patient case reports, experts should be able to build new hypotheses, Scott and Ben argue. They shouldn’t have such an emotional conviction to past beliefs that they can’t be moved by new data. Innovating patient care and treatment is to understand exactly what is clear within the data, and for what isn’t clear, to make adjustments.
 
The Next Step
Research and medication needs to adapt. What was believed to be effective in the past is no longer so in the present. “Frankly in clinical medicine, the endpoints to show that something is efficacious are either to demonstrate improvements and how a patient feels or functions or survives,” Scott says. Measuring survivability is important but if patients are presenting that they don’t feel well, or aren’t functioning the same, and medical experts turn a blind eye to that, then there will be no innovation in terms of truly tackling the disease. The next step for treatment would be diagnostic testing that gets much closer, and that which puts data back into the hands of clinicians, so they can advise patients properly and with better protocols.
 
Resources
Scott Endicott | LinkedIn
Ben Locwin | LinkedIn | Twitter
 
 

Categories
Compliance Into the Weeds

A Single Source of Truth


Compliance into the Weeds is the only weekly podcast which takes a deep dive into a compliance related topic, literally going into the weeds to more fully explore a subject. Today, Matt and Tom take a the recently filed lawsuit by Shaquala Williams against JPMorgan for alleged retaliation for her internal whistleblowing. Williams was in a compliance function at the bank and claimed she was terminated for raising the issues that JPMorgan was not living up to its reporting requirements under a DPA.Some of the issues we consider are:

  • Facts of the claim?
  • Made in the context of an ongoing DPA.
  • The lack of lack of documented policies and procedures.
  • Siloed nature of compliance functions.
  • Inconsistency in risk assessments.
  • Why is a single source of truth so critical?

Resources
Matt in Radical Compliance, That Lawsuit Against JP Morgan

Categories
Daily Compliance News

November 17, 2021 the He Knew All Along edition


In today’s edition of Daily Compliance News:

Categories
Compliance Kitchen

FinCEN Update


FinCEN issued an updated “Advisory on Ransomware and the Use of the Financial System to Facilitate Ransom Payments”.  Tune in for more details as the Kitchen reviews this latest resource.

Categories
The Compliance Life

Wendy Badger-Into the CCO Chair

The Compliance Life details the journey to and in the role of a Chief Compliance Officer. How does one come to sit in the CCO chair? What are some of the skills a CCO needs to success navigate the compliance waters in any company? What are some of the top challenges CCOs have faced and how did they meet them? These questions and many others will be explored in this new podcast series. Over four episodes each month on The Compliance Life, I visit with one current or former CCO to explore their journey to the CCO chair. This month, my guest is Wendy Badger, CCO at Tennant Company.

Wendy was recruited for head of compliance role at a non-profit financial services organization. She emphasized the collaborative nature of the role and some of the key lessons she learned. She discussed some of the challenges and successes she had in the role and her eventual decision to step away from the position.

Resources

 Wendy Badger LinkedIn Profile

Categories
Innovation in Compliance

Data Cleansing and Relativity Trace with Jordan Domash Part 2


 
Jordan Domash returns as Tom Fox’s guest in this week’s show. Jordan is the General Manager at Relativity, a company that makes software to help users organize their data. Jordan has been leading Relativity’s communications surveillance product for the past few years and is in charge of the sale and development of the platform. This week, Jordan and Tom talk about changes in data management and cybersecurity approaches, what regulators look for and how cybersecurity will evolve in the coming years.
 

 
Relativity and Regulation
With the explosion of data volumes due to an increase in communication platforms, the variety of data sources that need to be monitored has exploded as well. In regulated organizations, employees who want to engage in mischievous activity know they’re being monitored, and so are consciously doing everything they can to avoid detection. However, technology has advanced so that it is now able to capture and monitor every data source that’s widely used today. Relativity offers dozens of different tools that allow a compliance officer to focus on what’s truly important. “At the end of the day it’s about being risk based…It’s about focusing on your highest risks in the organization, defining them in advance, defining the population that is susceptible to that risk, and focusing your energy on reviewing alerts that seem the highest risk within those categories,” Jordan tells Tom.
 
A Change In Approach
The pandemic has affected how people approach data management and cybersecurity. It has also affected how Relativity Trace responded to these issues. Regulators have made it clear that the data from voice interactions need to be recorded. Relativity has seen an influx of customers and clients requesting for more data sources to capture voice data. “We need to invest a lot to keep pace with the evolution of the world’s communication habits,” Jordan remarks. Compliance teams are also no longer operating next to each other so a lot of the collaboration that is happening with these teams require systems to manage them. Relativity has built tools that allow compliance teams to use one main tool to manage their internal processes. “We’d like that all centralized in the system where the actual compliance monitoring is happening,” Jordan adds. 
 
The Impact of COVID-19
The biggest impact the pandemic has had on regulatory scrutiny is the reinforcement that obligations don’t change in a remote work environment. Compliance officers still need to capture all communication vehicles. Individuals may be communicating differently, or are no longer in a controlled environment, but capturing and monitoring communication data is just as important. 
 
What’s Next
In the coming years, Jordan tells Tom, businesses will be shifting away from on-site technology and moving more heavily towards cloud technologies. In compliance and compliance monitoring, there is going to be a greater focus on leveraging AI capabilities. 
 
Resources
Jordan Domash | LinkedIn 
Relativity
 

Categories
Understanding Lyme Disease

Understanding Lyme Disease – Episode 2: The Diagnosis Dilemma


 
Tom Fox welcomes back Scott Endicott and Ben Locwin on this episode of the Understanding Lyme Disease Podcast Series. Scott – who has had Lyme disease – is a clinical researcher, and Ben deals with Healthcare Policy at Maven. In this episode, they look at the changes that occur in the body when you contract Lyme disease.
 

 
Testing For Lyme Disease
There are blood tests that are carried out to determine whether a patient has Lyme disease, and it’s a two step process. The first half of the test is called the Eliza test which detects antibodies the human body may or may not be producing against the organism that causes Lyme disease. The second half of the blood tests is called the Western blot which looks at antibodies to specific proteins in the Borrelia Burgdorferi organism. These tests are the original diagnostic tests and have been used since the beginning. 
 
The Problems with Diagnosis
Scott explains that PCR testing has come about after these tests and is there to identify the infecting agent. The challenge with PCR testing, however, is the way that the Borrelia Burgdorferi organism actually behaves in real time. The challenge with the Eliza and Western blot as well is that both tests can give false negatives for weeks because the organism has a way of mutating and masking itself. Diagnosis has been dependent on the primary symptom of Lyme disease which is the bullseye rash, a symptom only 30% of patients have. This makes it challenging and confusing for these patients. Clinicians are being given a primary symptom that only one third of patients experience. “There is a real disparity there with as far as how clinicians view this and very often…they’ll basically look at it and say, ‘Well if it’s not a rash, then I’m not going to treat you at this point,’” Scott remarks. Infectious disease experts will advise patients to treat with Doxycycline, and essentially hope for the best.
 
Dilemma of Diagnosis
With a disease that mutates, there is an urgent need to identify and treat it quickly. Infectious experts look at it as a challenge to diagnostic criteria as opposed to treating prophylactically and leave details for later. This ends up putting patients in a bind between standard medical treatment and other unconventional methods. Many Lyme disease clinicians are Lyme disease sufferers themselves, and so are forced to act outside of accepted protocols in order to properly address symptoms.
 
Resources
Scott Endicott | LinkedIn
Ben Locwin | LinkedIn | Twitter
 

Categories
Daily Compliance News

November 16, 2021 the Retro is Cool edition


In today’s edition of Daily Compliance News:

Categories
Coffee and Regs

PRIIPs Delay, But Not Implementation Delays

PRIIPs Delay, But Not Implementation Delays

In this episode, CSS’s SVP of Business Development Ashley Smith joins Chief Product Officer Ronan Brennan to discuss the latest on the PRIIPs RTS, UK/EU divergence, data management complexities of the UCITS to PRIIPs transition and operational best practices to implement now.

 

About Our Guest Speakers:


Ronan Brennan is the Chief Product Officer at Compliance Solutions Strategies (CSS). In his role, he has direct responsibility for the strategic evolution of the global suite of CSS products and regulatory content. Managing product in CSS involves ensuring the product suite is ready to support both the current and future compliance management and regulatory reporting needs of investment management and advisory firms globally. Ronan participates as a speaker in many industry events each year, in addition to publishing a company blog and development of thought leadership materials. Ronan has 26 years of experience in the technology sector, 21 of which have been spent in the investment data management and regulatory reporting space.

 
 

 
Ashley Smith is a sales and business development professional with 30 years of experience in the financial services sector. Ashley started his career with the Financial Times and has led sales, marketing and business development teams across leading solution providers in data management, market data, risk analytics, collateral management and regulatory compliance.