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USDA Food Guideline Calls to “Make Every Bite Count”

Pocono Organics

The USDA’s 2020-2025 food guidelines highlight the need for Americans to eat more nutrient-dense foods to promote better health and fight the risk of chronic disease. Pocono Organics founder and president, Ashley Walsh, knows the power of using food as medicine from her personal health journey with gastroparesis which led her to starting one of the largest regenerative organic farms in North America. “I was diagnosed with gastroparesis in my late 20s,” said Walsh. “That means that my stomach is paralyzed and I can’t digest food properly. The doctors told me that they could help me by cutting out parts of my stomach, using feeding tubes, and putting me on a regimen of medications. Those weren’t options I was willing to accept. That started my journey with organic and more nutrient-dense foods. The powerful results of using food as medicine along with plant-based supplements were undeniable for me - instead of being sick five days a week, I was sick five days a month. I was also able to get off of all the medications I was taking for my health because of my stomach. “The problem was that I wasn’t able to get the nutrient-dense organic foods I needed. That’s when the vision for Pocono Organics came to life. I was thrilled to see the USDA theme because when you live with gastroparesis, every bite of food does count! And, when you consider that we rely on just four crops to provide 60% of our daily caloric intake, we have to explore and grow more nutrient-dense food options.” Pocono Organics, which opened to the public in June of 2020, spans more than 380 acres atop the iconic Pocono Mountains and grows regenerative organic produce for retailers, distributors, restaurants, and consumers. Regenerative organic agricultural practices make soil health the priority and include low-till methods and zero-use of chemicals and pesticides. Pocono Organics’ farming approach, in partnership with Rodale Institute, produces some of the cleanest and most nutrient-dense crops grown on earth – making them better for consumers – while also strengthening and healing the soil in which they are grown – which is better for our planet. “For more than 70 years, our partners at Rodale Institute have led the world in regenerative organic science and research that shows how healthy soil grows more nutrient-dense food,” Walsh continued. “Our vision, as a health and wellness organization, is to inspire people and heal the earth. The United Nations has reported that we have less than 50 farming cycles left before our soil is completely depleted of the nutrients needed to grow the food we need. So, we are not only facing issues of human health, but of soil health that will further impact humanity and the food we eat.” Pocono Organics is a Global Center for Research, Education, and Discovery, and is an agritourism destination. Visitors enjoy freshly picked ingredients and prepared meals from its café and are able to stock up with certified organic pantry items in the market. There are also regular in-person and virtual experiential series ranging from cooking masterclasses from executive chef and Food Network Chopped Champion, Lindsay McClain to wellness and food education programs for children. The Pocono Organics education team will also be offering virtual food label reading webinars to share tips on how to read package labels to know what you are really putting in your and your family’s bodies. Walsh and her team have recently launched one of the cleanest and one of the first regenerative organic grown, full-spectrum hemp extract product lines in the world. Pocono Organics’ CBD is the only line to carry the respected Rodale Institute logo on its products and packaging. Pocono Organics’ wellness products are CBD-abundant and harness the power of full-spectrum hemp extract to deliver a broader range of health-promoting cannabinoids. These wellness resources - available online and carried in retail outlets, spas, and numerous doctors’ offices across multiple states - are formulated in Pocono Organics' in-house lab to create artisanal, small-batch items including tinctures, creams, salve sticks, lip balms, and bath bombs. Pocono Organics Pocono Organics is a health and wellness organization with a mission to inspire people and heal the earth. The Global Center for Research, Education, and Discovery is one of the largest regenerative organic farms in North America. Located in Long Pond, Pennsylvania, Pocono Organics has more than 380 acres of farm land and, at full build out, will have 120,000 square feet of greenhouse. Pocono Organics has a strategic partnership with Rodale Institute, the global leaders in Regenerative Organic Agriculture practices and research and is one of their largest research satellite facilities. Awarded the 2019 Environmental Innovator of the Year by the Green Sports Alliance, sustainability is a hallmark of Pocono Organics. The farm draws power from a 3MW, 25-acre solar farm and reclaims rain water from 70,000 square feet of roofs for irrigation. Pocono Organics also serves the local community through its Clean Food, Dirty Hands school education program and veterans in transition through a Veteran Farmer Training Program. In addition, the property includes an organic farmer’s market and café, and with a 56-room adjoining hotel, is an agritourism destination, and host location for annual festivals. Please visit www.PoconoOrganics.com to learn more about Pocono Organic’s mission and work. Contact Details Mike Mooney +1 704-361-9499 mike@poconoorganics.com Company Website https://www.poconoorganics.com/

January 08, 2021 08:05 AM Eastern Standard Time

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CMMC Center of Excellence Announces Engagement Agreement with SideChannel

Interoperability Clearinghouse

The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Center of Excellence ( CMMC COE ), hosted by the Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council (IT-AAC), a public-private partnership serving the public and private sectors for more than 15 years, is excited to announce a partnership with SideChannel, an innovative tech-enabled advisory firm providing a wide range of risk management and cybersecurity capabilities working with small businesses, mid-market companies, non-profit corporations, venture capitalist portfolios, startups, municipalities and governments on how to protect their digital assets and bolster their cybersecurity posture. This unique partnership will extend efforts to advance the goals and objectives for improving supply chain security and cyber resilience of the US Department of Defense (DoD) global Defense Industrial Base (DIB) network of contractors, partners, and vendors. The executed Engagement Agreement establishes a collaborative partnership between SideChannel and CMMC COE to partner in the furthering of their respective and complementary missions and objectives regarding the adoption, use, and expansion of CMMC based cybersecurity practices, risk management, and compliance for the DIB contractor community and the information and communications technology community creating a broader CMMC ecosystem globally to improve security and resilience. Specific actions will include: The co-development of CMMC advisory services, cyber training and education programs to accelerate CMMC certification, increase cyber adoption and improve cyber protection & resilience. Co-sponsor symposiums, training programs and podcasts leveraging their combined cyber and IT expertise. Host regular working groups, with other partners, to enable collaboration and communications. Source qualified CMMC/ cyber professionals to serve as advocates. Establish an independent Industry Cyber Security Advisory Council with peer organizations to advise and educate leaders across government and industry on the continued evolution and effectiveness of CMMC. The CMMC-COE ( http://cmmc-coe.org ) and SideChannel partnership will focus on bringing together the many disparate cyber and national security communities of interest to reduce complexity, improve awareness, and accelerate industry effort to become more cyber resilient against the growing threats from nation states and criminal enterprises. The range of capabilities offered by SideChannel, including its virtual and fractional Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) service, further strengthens the portfolio of technology partner providers supporting the CMMC Center of Excellence. SideChannel’s focus is on the delivery of vCISO services and expert level advisory, from former CISOs, to organizations that cannot attract, fund or retain a full-time employee. Their model provides a subscription to industry recognized experts that will build, guide, and mature any organization’s security program. SideChannel’s adoption by both large and smaller clients has led to significantly reduced risk, better aligned prioritization of resourcing and corrected budgets without sacrificing capabilities. “This is exciting opportunity for us”, said Mr. John Weiler, Chairman of the Board at CMMC Center of Excellence, “This new partnership will further help advance the goals and objectives for improving the supply chain security and resilience of the US Department of Defense (DoD)”. “We are honored and excited about the opportunity to partner with the CMMC COE and support the critical efforts to protect our supply chain, to improve cybersecurity protection and better the resilience across the Defense Industrial Base globally,” said Brian Haugli, Managing Partner, SideChannel. The CMMC-COE establishes both a Market Place and Knowledge Clearinghouse that includes resources and supports the overall effort including white papers; tutorials; recorded webcasts; presentations; and more. This will help reduce the cost and burden on small and medium size contractors already struggling from the impact of COVID. For more information on the CMMC COE, please visit http://cmmc-coe.org email info@cmmc-coe.org or call 703-863-3766 For more information on SideChannel, please visit https://www.sidechannel.com About Us ---------- CMMC-COE.ORG is a unique non-profit public-private partnership, with a vision to accelerate Cybersecurity Maturity Model (CMM) adoption, and reduce time & cost for security compliance for our partners by leveraging commercial best practices, CMMC standards, and innovative solutions for a measurable success. Our mission, focused on DOD mission objectives, cost containment and expeditious CMMC compliance, is to help the DIB improve cyber posture and resilience, and simplify its acquisition. The CMMC-COE is hosted by the Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council (IT-AAC), a public/private partnership (P3) chartered in 2007 as an honest broker to reach outside the confines of the Federal IT advisories that lack dynamic reach into the Global IT Market, and dedicated to the adoption of commercial IT management standards of practice and innovations emanating from the Global IT market. Team IT-AAC has already demonstrated the value of its decade long investment, and provides a unique value to agencies seeking to achieve accelerate the transformation of legacy processes and systems. Our Just-in-Time SMEs apply an innovative suite of Technology Business Management and Agile Acquisition Processes needed to assure the business value of commercial IT. The Interoperability Clearinghouse (ICH), is the managing partner that make up the 24 NGO/SDO organizations that make up the IT-AAC. ICH provides the contract vehicles, clearances, and critical resources proven to guide sustainable, measurable and repeatable processes needed to drive better investment decisions as the speed of mission need, while aligning existing processes, methods and workforce with IT reform mandates contained in Clinger Cohen Act, FITARA, IT MGT Act, EO13838. Contact Details Bob Dix +1 703-975-6633 bob.dix@it-aac.org Company Website https://cmmc-coe.org

January 06, 2021 06:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

Staying on Top of Children’s Health During the Pandemic

YourUpdateTV

Your child’s care provider does many important things, like checking your baby’s development and giving immunizations. They can also help you watch over your baby’s health. Recently, Dr. Arethusa Kirk, Chief Medical Officer at UnitedHealthcare, teamed with YourUpdateTV on a satellite media tour to discuss the important issue of pediatric health. A video accompanying this announcement is available at: https://youtu.be/qFe6qoBCuew The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted how Americans are accessing health care and, for parents or guardians of a new baby, it has created questions about how to safely ensure early development goals are met. In light of COVID-19 restrictions, UnitedHealthcare is raising awareness for the importance of vaccinations and well visits. While virtual visits and telehealth are care options to consider, check with your doctor about what qualifies, newborn and baby well visits and immunizations should be done in a clinical setting. Your baby should go to at least eight well-child visits before they are 15 months old and preparation is key for a more comfortable appointment. Knowing what will happen at each of these appointments can help you get ready. There may be special steps to take when you arrive for your appointment. Call your child’s care provider before your visit. And remember to practice social distancing, wash your hands often and wear a mask. If you are a UnitedHealthcare Community Plan member, you may have access to our Healthy First Steps program, which can help you find a care provider, schedule well-child visits, connect with educational and community resources and more. For more information, visit UHC.com/childrenswellness About Dr. Arethusa Kirk: Dr. Arethusa Stevens Kirk is the Chief Medical Officer for UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Maryland where she directs clinical initiatives for member-centric care coordination, population health, and quality programs. Dr. Kirk has served as a National Health Service Corps Scholar and as the Vice President of Medical Affairs at Total Health Care, a Federally Qualified Health Center in Baltimore City. She continues to practice as an Associate Physician of the Neurology and Development Inpatient Unit at Kennedy Krieger Institute and as a primary care physician. Prior to her career in medicine she served as a volunteer with the Missionaries of Charity in India and as a Health Education Coordinator in The Gambia West Africa for the U.S. Peace Corps. About YourUpdateTV: YourUpdateTV is a social media video portal for organizations to share their content. It includes separate channels for Health and Wellness, Lifestyle, Media and Entertainment, Money and Finance, Social Responsibility, Sports and Technology. Contact Details YourUpdateTV +1 212-736-2727 yourupdatetv@gmail.com

December 28, 2020 11:45 AM Eastern Standard Time

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New data release shows where hospitals are overwhelmed across America

Stacker

Hospitals across the country are on the verge of overflowing with nearly 700 hospitals at over 90% inpatient capacity, according to a new dataset released Dec. 7 by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Meanwhile, 750 hospitals have exceeded 90% capacity in their intensive care units, where patients in critical condition are treated. Stacker created a report complete with data visualizations that can be found here. These numbers come as a third surge of COVID-19 outbreaks rages in nearly every state. When hospitals are overwhelmed, it becomes challenging for doctors and nurses to provide COVID-19 patients with the attention care they need and can lead to further loss of life. The new HHS dataset provides a granular picture of these grim national statistics, including counts of patients and hospital beds at the individual hospital level for more than 4,000 facilities across the country. These counts are reported by hospitals nearly every day, either sent directly to the HHS or sent to state public health departments and hospital networks that aggregate the data. Stacker used these counts to calculate three values for each hospital: Patients hospitalized with COVID-19: share of COVID-19 patients compared to all patients in the hospital Inpatient bed occupancy: how many standard care beds in the hospital are currently filled with patients ICU bed occupancy: how many intensive care beds are currently filled with patients HHS also reports hospitalization data at the state level. National insights (as of Dec. 13) include: The states with the highest rates of occupied beds are Maryland (79.8% of all beds occupied), Washington D.C. (80.0%), and Rhode Island (85.2%). States with the highest shares of their populations hospitalized with COVID-19 are Arizona (53 patients per 100,000 population), Pennsylvania (55 per 100K), and Nevada (67 per 100K). 19% of hospitals in the nation are facing critical staffing shortages, while 24% anticipate such a shortage within the next week. Staffing shortages are highest in Arkansas (33.6% of hospitals in the state), Wisconsin (35.6%), and North Dakota (42.0%). For more details on methodology or insights about your state, contact us at melanie@thestacker.com. With the overload of content across the web, it can be hard to wade through the fake, biased, or just plain boring stories. That’s why at Stacker we built a brand committed to combining objective expert analysis with rich editorial insights—delivering stories that help readers understand important topics in their neighborhood or around the world, in a format that’s enjoyable to consume. Contact Details Melanie Holohan +1 858-200-6450 melanie@thestacker.com

December 18, 2020 11:20 AM Eastern Standard Time

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Americans receive 12,000 pointless emails a year - and these are the phrases to avoid

SizzleDeck

Nearly three in every four emails sent is pointless or irrelevant – according to new research. If you’ve ever felt yourself drowning in emails or a slave to your inbox you may well relate to a new online survey of 2,002 Americans that found 73 percent of the emails people receive aren’t relevant or interesting to them-if they’re even opened at all. Respondents in the census-balanced survey from SizzleDeck estimated they receive 44 emails each day on average between work and personal accounts – and cited 32 of those emails typically aren’t worth paying attention to or require no action on their part. That equates to over 16,000 emails in a typical year with precisely 11,680 of them deemed a waste of time. The survey found more than half (54%) of Americans polled have real difficulty clearing their work email inbox. But while things get lost in the inbox, sending a text is still an effective way to get attention the average respondent checks their phone 18 times during the typical working day. Perhaps that’s why Americans are more than three times more likely to prefer to read text messages than open emails (48% v 14%). A spokesperson for SizzleDeck said: “This survey backs up what our instincts were telling us, most people have a tonne of unread emails, but hardly anyone has an unread text message. If you want to be sure your message gets read, send it by text.” Whether it’s texts or emails, our attention spans are dominated by our phones. In addition to the 18 phone sessions we have during our working hours, three-quarters of us admit checking our phones is the very first thing we do in the morning and the very last thing we do at night. When not on their phones, people tend to have better attention skills in-person than they do virtually. When asked how long it would take them to mentally check out during a presentation, the average for Zoom presentations was six slides. For in-person meetings, it takes seven slides before people will start to check out. And it’s not just the visuals but the words that really count. People have a low tolerance for work jargon, it seems. When asked what work phrases they hate the most, respondents said “per my last email” (32%), “we’re all in this together” (32%) and “blue sky thinking” (29%) rounded the top of the list. The spokesperson for SizzleDeck added: “In pure communication terms, we find that the key to getting people to read and respond to a message is to keep it simple, keep it short and avoid clichés. The clearest communicators write the same way the talk.” TOP WORST WORK JARGON 1. Per my last email 32% 2. We ’ re all in this together 32% 3. Blue sky thinking 29% 4. Did you get that thing I sent you? 28% 5. Let ’ s touch base 27% 6. Let ’ s circle back 23% 7. Can you get this to me EOD? 23% 8. Let ’ s table that 21% 9. Let ’ s get this offline 12% The census-balanced survey of 2,002 Americans was conducted online in November 2020. About SizzleDeck SizzleDeck is a software application that makes it easy for businesses to build, share and track phone-friendly landing pages. Contact Details Rick Maughan +1 929-359-2537 rickmaughan@hotmail.co.uk

December 17, 2020 08:14 AM Eastern Standard Time

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Observability platform LOGIQ raises US$1.8 million in seed funding from Leo Capital

Stockwood Strategy

LOGIQ, an observability platform for IT administrators and DevOps teams, announced that it has raised US$1.8 million in its first institutional seed funding round, led by Leo Capital. The funding will be used to expand its AI/ML capabilities and onboard more customers. LOGIQ solves the ubiquitous problem enterprises are faced with when handling the variety and volume of data in the organisation, while running their IT infrastructure and applications. Half of all organizations* process more than 100GB of log data in different formats every day, and the numbers continue to rise. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is such a flood of data available from APIs, databases, data lakes, etc. The lack of a unified platform that can converge this data has long been a pain point for IT practitioners, DevOps users, and developers alike. LOGIQ's mission is to make all IT data accessible and analyzable. By unifying data types, such as logs, metrics, databases, and APIs, LOGIQ's Observability platform enables them to harness the power of machine data analytics for applications and infrastructure in a single platform with 1-Click simplicity. Users can aggregate log data, gather performance metrics, access API's and connect databases such as Elastic, Mongo, Postgres, Druid, and Mysql for real-time visibility into the health of their IT infrastructure and application environments. Commenting on the fundraise Ranjan Parthasarathy, CEO and Co-Founder, at LOGIQ, said, “We started with the goal of helping enterprises transition from managing their data in silos to a more unified manner in which they can harness their data. With LOGIQ, we want to empower developers and administrators in keeping their infrastructure and applications always running. The funding raised will enable us to widen our reach and also enhance our AI/ML capabilities.” Tito George, Co-Founder, LOGIQ, said, “Data is the new oil across enterprises. However, there is also a need for a solution that helps them manage this data efficiently without hampering their operational efficiency or infrastructure. This is what LOGIQ has set out to do with its products and offerings. This funding will help us take our solutions to more industry stakeholders.” Commenting on the investment, Rajul Garg, Managing Partner, at Leo Capital, said, “There is a huge amount of data being generated across all sectors today. Consequently, the need of the hour is a platform like LOGIQ that can help enterprises organize, manage, and categorize this data without affecting their processes and infrastructure. We are thrilled to back them and have tremendous faith in both the company and its leadership.” LOGIQ can be hosted as a self-service or managed SaaS, providing maximum flexibility to the user. LOGIQ’s support for industry standards ensures full compatibility with legacy infrastructures like bare-metal servers, VM's, switches, and more modern cloud-native environments like Kubernetes and public cloud infrastructure. Some of their USPs include unified view, predictable pricing, one-click set-up, and zero tax storage management tax. LOGIQ has a strong and motivated team with over 100 years of expertise in production engineering, building and running IT, DevOps, and DevSecOps in private and public cloud environments. LOGIQ plans to democratize the observability space and make it more accessible for organizations of all sizes. Ends * International Data Corporation (IDC) survey, The Pivotal Role of Log Analytics in Modern IT Infrastructures Notes to the editor About LOGIQ LOGIQ is the creator of the LOGIQ platform, a converged data analysis software that brings ingest, indexing, search, SQL, and streaming capabilities backed by any S3 compatible object-store. LOGIQ Log Insights is built on this converged architecture bringing scalability and simplicity to your IT operations analytics projects. The converged architecture enables rapid integration with AI platforms for gaining valuable business insights from your data. About Leo Capital Leo Capital, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage technology investments, has built a portfolio of over 20 companies since its launch in 2018. Tech is the common denominator for the venture capital fund that has invested in software-as-a-service companies, consumer internet, logistics, health tech, ed-tech, and fintech startups. Its portfolio includes automation testing tool Lambdatest, cloud PC Workspot, diabetes management app BeatO, logistics startup Vahak, gaming platform – Bombay Play, video shopping app Bulbul and ed-tech startup Edureka. Contact Details Bilal Mahmood +44 7714 007257 b.mahmood@stockwoodstrategy.com Company Website https://logiq.ai/

December 16, 2020 08:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

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Hashnode funding round attracts marquee tech investors as traction gathers pace

Stockwood Strategy

Global blogging community for developers Hashnode, today announced it has raised US$2.1m in funding led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge. A range of marquee investors* also participated including Naval Ravikant (early investor in Twitter, Uber and co-founder of AngelList), Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal (founders of BrowserStack) as well as Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur (founders at Razorpay). Founded just 6 months ago in June 2020 by Sandeep Panda and Syed Fazle Rahman, Hashnode helps developers and engineering teams start technical blogs and share them with the broader developer community. The platform is growing at a rate of 25% month-on-month in. More than 20,000 new developer blogs have been created on the platform in a few months and over 500,000 readers visit https://hashnode.com every month. Developer blogs are the heart of many developer communities that share, learn, and drive innovation around specific products, projects, hacks, and code branches. The rapid growth of the API economy, which is underpinning the tech sector's growth, has been fuelled by these developer communities. Currently, there are two types of blogging solutions. Publishing networks (like Medium) help a blogger with social media credibility and reach at the cost of content ownership and customization. There are self-hosting solutions, like WordPress, but distributing the content is difficult, which makes it hard to create large, active communities. The cost of running the software also keeps increasing. Hashnode helps writers focus on writing and gives them the freedom to blog without the risk of losing their content or losing control of traffic and SEO. Fazle Rahman, CEO at Hashnode commented: “We realised many writers just want a platform that helps them focus on writing and gives them the freedom to blog without losing control over their content or thinking about traffic and SEO. Hashnode allows developers and businesses to create a blog on a custom domain and stay connected with a central community for content distribution. This solves both the problem of content ownership and distribution.” Hashnode powered blogs are easy to use, set up, configure, highly optimised for SEO, and have built-in community interaction functionalities like reactions, comments, bookmarks, and more. “Hashnode allows developers and businesses that want to build developer communities to create a blog on a custom domain, and stay connected with a central dev community for content distribution. The platform also allows publishing articles directly from Github, a feature not available on other publishing tools,” added Fazle Sandeep and Fazle are avid developers, bloggers and authors who have both published several books on various web technologies. They graduated together from IIIT Bhubaneswar in Computer Science Engineering and have a shared passion for building products for the web and teaching developers online. * Angel investors in the round include: Naval Ravikant (AngelList, Uber, Twitter, Stack Overflow, Yammer), Ed Roman (Pluralsight and Hack Summit), Shashank Kumar (Razorpay), Harshil Mathur (Razorpay), Ritesh Arora (BrowserStack), Nakul Aggarwal (BrowserStack), Christopher Golda (BlackType, acquired by Twitter), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Salil Deshpande Uncorrelated Ventures) and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). Ends About Hashnode Hashnode is a free content creation platform and community that allows people to publish articles on their own domain and helps them stay connected with a growing developer community. Contact Details Bilal Mahmood +44 7714 007257 b.mahmood@stockwoodstrategy.com Company Website https://hashnode.com/

December 15, 2020 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time

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Rheumatologists Applaud SCOTUS’ Unanimous Decision

Coalition of State Rheumatology Organizations

The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld Arkansas’ Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) law in the Rutledge V. PCMA case. The state statute required PBMs to reimburse pharmacies at a break-even point or above. The PBM industry argued that the Arkansas law was preempted by ERISA, a federal statute governing employee benefit plans. “In 2017, CSRO began its “Rebate Road Show” educating providers, patients, regulators, and legislators on the harmful practices of PBMs. In fact, one of the first talks I gave in 2017 was at the Arkansas State Rheumatology Association,” said Dr. Madelaine Feldman, CSRO President and private practice rheumatologist in New Orleans, LA. “To see the court’s decision that Arkansas’ law is not preempted by ERISA is a major victory for patients and future state laws regulating PBM’s. Remarkably, not a single Supreme Court Justice dissented.” The CSRO, a founding member of the Alliance for Transparent and Affordable Prescriptions (ATAP), contributed to a Supreme Court amicus brief filed by ATAP in the case. In the brief, ATAP outlined for the Court the harmful effects that PBM business practices have even beyond their effect on pharmacies; namely, on patient access and the practice of medicine. In the opinion penned by Justice Sotomayor, the Court recognized that the PBM argument in this case amounted to an attempt to hide behind preemption to avoid all State regulation, finding that, ‘Taken to its logical endpoint, PCMA’s argument would pre-empt any suits under state law that could affect the price or provision of benefits.’ “The Court clearly understood that PBMs have gone far too long without taking any responsibility for the harm to patients they cause by their business practices,” added Dr. Feldman. “This opinion provides a roadmap for policymakers as they attempt to rein in the abusive practices of the PBM industry for supply chain stakeholders beyond pharmacies.” The CSRO will continue to move forward in support of regulating PBMs, and to push for new legislation that protects patient access and affordability for prescription medications at the state and federal levels. The Coalition of State Rheumatology Organizations (CSRO) is comprised of a group of state and regional professional rheumatology societies throughout the country formed to advocate for excellence in rheumatologic disease care and to ensure access to the highest quality care for the management of rheumatologic and musculoskeletal diseases. Our nationwide coalition serves practicing rheumatologists in charge of patient care for these illnesses. Contact Details Dan Rene +1 202-329-8357 daniel.rene@kglobal.com

December 11, 2020 02:30 PM Eastern Standard Time

Richpanel raises funding to eliminate customer service tickets for ecommerce

Stockwood Strategy

Richpanel, a revolutionary customer service platform for the ecommerce industry, has raised an undisclosed investment as part of Sequoia Capital India’s Surge with the aim to eliminate customer service tickets with an “Amazon-like” customer account section. Founded in January 2019 and headquartered in both India and the US, Richpanel was created with the purpose of helping ecommerce companies scale business without hiring more agents. The platform allows merchants to design an account page on their online storefront where they can automate order tracking, exchanges, returns, cancellations, and any other scenario which would otherwise result in a support ticket. While tech giants like Amazon and Uber have made massive investments to automate their purchase & post purchase flows like “where is my order” and “change trip destination”, these kinds of queries result in support tickets for every other business. They rely on a team of agents and a ticketing system to handle them, creating costs and inefficiencies. Richpanel’s platform helps these businesses launch a self-service portal on their stores, allowing customers to perform actions without ever having to contact a support agent. This means businesses can scale their operations without constantly expanding their support team. “The first time I disputed a cancellation fee on a ride-sharing platform, I mentally prepared myself for a 15-minute-long chat with a support rep, but I was pleasantly surprised when the entire process took less than 60 seconds. This automated customer service support technology can save ecommerce businesses millions of dollars, and we felt there was a real need to productize this for everyone else,” said Amit RG, CEO at Richpanel “At Richpanel, our goal is to help clients eliminate unnecessary support tickets. Businesses have tried chatbots, FAQs and help center solutions, but what they need is a solution that does not ‘deflect’ customers but ‘resolves’ their issues. Currently, our platform is able to resolve 40-50% of incoming queries and we will take this up to 80% over the coming months,” Amit RG added. Richpanel is the next generation in customer service support and seeks to disrupt the help desk software market as well as customer care outsourcing services, where businesses are expected to spend $110b by 20241. The platform provides a seamless experience for both visiting customers and businesses to handle cases where customers need to speak with a human. The ‘agent inbox’ helps brands manage all their support channels - email, live chat, social media & phone - from one place. The integration with ecommerce platforms help agents see complete purchase history, take order actions and respond to customers from one screen. Clients such as US-based apparel company Pawz.com are seeing positive results with Richpanel. “As one of Richpanel’s early adopters, we have been extremely happy with the platform and the team’s ability to deliver well on projects. Currently, our self-service flows powered by Richpanel are able to close nearly 60% of all incoming queries or tickets, without the need to interact with an agent,” said Julian Quintães, CEO at Pawz.com. Ends Notes to the editor 1 Radian Insights, Outsourced customer care services market worth $84.7 billion by 2020 Richpanel is a customer service solutions platform, purpose-built for the ecommerce industry. Founded in January 2019 with headquarters in both India and the US, Richpanel’s self-service platform allows merchants to design an Amazon-style account page on their store, where they can automate order tracking, returns, exchanges, cancellations, order changes and more. The platform also has an agent help desk to help customer support agents manage incoming queries across various touch points such as email, live chat, social media and phone. Today, over 1,000 merchants all over the world use Richpanel every day to support their customers. Contact Details Bilal Mahmood +44 7714 007257 b.mahmood@stockwoodstrategy.com Company Website https://richpanel.com/

December 09, 2020 10:30 AM Eastern Standard Time

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