PBMs control Americans’ access to often life-saving medications and they increase costs. Unpredictable and irrational “DIR fees” imposed on pharmacies have skyrocketed 107,400% over the past decade. Further, from 2014-2022, 1,357 medications were excluded from at least one PBM formulary for at least one year. The result is higher cost medications and less choice for patients.
“Pharmaceutical benefit manipulation” harms patients and pharmacies by driving up prices, limiting access to certain medications, and forcing pharmacies that serve their communities to close, especially in rural and underserved communities.
The national 30-second spot, titled ‘REAL REFORM’, addresses what U.S. Congress must do to stop abusive PBM tactics, while also strengthening oversight of PBMs, ensuring accountability, transparency, and fairness. The ‘Real Reform’ ad campaign will include broadcast, cable, web-based news, and digital executions.
NACDS, which represents national and regional pharmacies in the drug store, supermarket and mass retail settings, has been fighting on the frontline of this critical issue, urging federal and state leaders alike to protect patients from PBM tactics. The federal government has specific actions that are within its power and responsibility to accomplish to bring PBM reform to Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, this year, NACDS has pushed for change at all levels of government and as a result, the enactment of 31 bills across 27 states led to 55 policy changes consistent with NACDS PBM reform and reimbursement priorities. This builds on the enactment of 101 state PBM reform bills combined in 2021 and 2022.
The full text of the ‘REAL REFORM’ 30-Second Ad is below:
You may be hearing a lot about pharmaceutical middlemen called PBMs. As a pharmacist, I want to let you know why it matters. For too long, these middlemen have . . . pocketed savings that belong to you . . . said ‘no’ to medicines you need . . . and blocked you from your local pharmacist . . . like me But Congress now has a chance to reduce drug costs – and improve access . . . for ALL patients. Including Americans on Medicare and Medicaid, who I serve every day. Because let’s be clear, if all patients don’t benefit. . . it’s not real reform.
SEAL Chaos Team’s Drills are designed to solve this problem by providing members of the crypto community hands-on training in running a war room. Operated by the SEAL Chaos Team consisting of samczsun, Head of Security at Paradigm, Isaac Patka, Co-Founder of Shield3, and numerous other security experts, SEAL Chaos Team takes projects through a tabletop exercise to assess a project’s threat model, before running a security incident simulation.
The SEAL Chaos Team has already conducted exercises with well-known protocols such as Compound Finance and Yearn Finance, and are currently preparing an exercise for Aave. Projects interested in signing up for Drills can do so using this form.
“In order to make crypto safer for everyone, we need to make sure that we’re doing everything we can across the spectrum to protect user funds,” said samczsun of Paradigm. “With SEAL 911, we made it easier for individuals to report security issues, and with the SEAL Chaos Team we’re excited to be providing high quality training to those who need it.”
“Designing these exercises for crypto companies is like holding regular fire drills; it’s not about inciting fear but ensuring readiness and honing reflexes,” added Isaac Patka. “We aim to highlight interdependencies, strengthen communications and learn from each other to build a resilient ecosystem.”
In early July, a Drill was conducted using the Compound Protocol as the testing grounds. As the protocol is decentralized, the exercise was designed to assess the response from protocol contributors – including Compound Labs, Chainlink Labs, Gauntlet, and OpenZeppelin.
It was successful in uncovering potential improvements in Compound Labs’ incident response process that can be applied for future blockchain products. OpenZeppelin also gained valuable insights to improve the protocol’s overall security posture with enhanced security monitoring and automation of key incident response steps as part of its security partnership with the Compound DAO.
“It is paramount for the Web3 sector to continue conducting such incident response exercises to help decentralized platforms prepare for major potential ‘black swan’ events,” said Michael Lewellen, Head of Solutions Architecture at OpenZeppelin. “While there is a low probability that you will be hacked, the impact of being exploited could be catastrophic if a protocol is not prepared.”
In late September, a second Drill was conducted for Yearn Finance, where an external protocol managing a large amount of user funds of a popular Yearn strategy was targeted. With the failure taking place outside of the core Yearn smart contracts, the team had to rapidly pull in the right subject matter experts and emergency procedures to put together a response plan. The exercise successfully tested their ability to understand how the affected strategy worked and what sequence of transactions needed to be made to recall funds to safety, and simulate the response before execution.
“Yearn was lucky to be one of the earliest teams approached by SEAL,” said banteg, Core Developer at Yearn. “We are not strangers to dealing with complex systems, investigating incidents. Our engineers can be often seen helping out in war rooms. And yet, we were thoroughly impressed with the sophistication that went into preparing and simulating the attack. We are very grateful to SEAL for this opportunity and highly recommend this exercise to other security-minded teams.”
About SEAL
SEAL is a collaborative effort among security professionals and other parties interested in improving security in the crypto ecosystem.
About the Compound protocol
Compound is an algorithmic, autonomous interest rate protocol built for developers, to unlock a universe of open financial applications. Learn more at https://compound.finance/.
About OpenZeppelin
OpenZeppelin is a leading blockchain security company providing security audits to the most trusted organizations in crypto. OpenZeppelin has also built the world’s leading Open Source library for smart contract development, which is trusted by thousands of public projects.
About Yearn
Yearn is DeFi‘s premier yield aggregator. Giving individuals, DAOs and other protocols a way to deposit digital assets and receive yield. The protocol is maintained by various independent developers and is governed by veYFI holders.
About Shield3
Shield3 is a security & compliance automation platform. Shield3 offers enterprises tailored workflows to analyze, understand, route, and report on transactions for all blockchain applications.
Prior to joining Link Money, Loone was Assistant General Counsel at Robinhood Markets, where she was part of the legal team that took the company through regulatory challenges and a successful IPO. She holds a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School.
Link Money’s first employee, Rohit Mehtani, who previously served as VP of Product Management, now serves as its Chief Product Officer. In this role, he will oversee product strategy; roadmap execution; and align product, engineering, data science and design teams to serve the company’s merchants and customers.
Prior to joining Link Money, Mehtani served as product management leader for Early Warning Services (EWS), where he led the industry defining integration of Zelle and Real Time Payments (RTP). Mehtani holds a Masters of Business Administration from University of California at Davis.
“Piret and Rohit have been integral in introducing pay by bank throughout the US. These promotions are well-deserved, and I’m confident that they will continue to meet our mission to bring pay by bank, powered by open banking, to merchants and consumers,” said Eric Shoykhet, Link Money CEO.
About Link Money: Link Money is a payment platform that offers fast and secure payment solutions. The platform enables individuals to make transactions directly with their bank accounts, offering security, ease, and a no-debt option, while offering merchants significantly lower fees than other payment methods.
Media Contact
Lauren Schiffman, Link Money, 1 415-684-8080, [email protected], https://www.link.money/
Brining Expertise in NK Cell Therapy to Advance Efforts in Cancer Prevention, early detection, and treatment development ▶ New focus on NK cell therapy for conquering cancer ▶ GC Cell seizes the opportunity to share its cell gene therapy technology and capabilities globally ▶ Development…
Meta Engineering Director, Daniel Kim, Joins as a Venture Partner at SparkLabs DeepTech
SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 25, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — SparkLabs Korea (http://www.sparklabs.co.kr), Asia’s leading startup accelerator and early-stage investor in South Korea, has launched a new venture capital fund, SparkLabs DeepTech. The first close of the fund was $15 million that will focus on seed and series A stage companies in South Korea.
SparkLabs Korea defines “deeptech” to include artificial intelligence, biotech, spacetech, smart cities, AR/VR, quantum computing, and advanced materials. The fund is led by Eugene Kim, a Managing Partner at SparkLabs Korea. Also Daniel Kim, a Director of Engineering at Meta (formerly Facebook), joins this fund as a Venture Partner.
Daniel is an Engineering Director at Meta (formerly Facebook), which he joined in early 2007 as employee within the first 225 hires, and is currently the 11th most tenured employee. Most recently, Daniel was the lead for NPE (New Product Experimentation) Korea, which is Meta’s in-house incubator and a key part of their global expansion strategy.
Prior to this role, he led engineering teams at Oculus, where his teams were in charge of things such as Horizon Home, Guardian, Anytime UI, and others. At Instagram, Daniel founded and led their growth engineering team, which was directly accountable for Instagram’s user growth from 170 million to 1.1 billion MAU (monthly active users) in under five years. As an engineer, Daniel was a founding member of Facebook’s Android team and helped to usher Facebook’s pivot to mobile in 2010.
“I’m excited that Daniel has joined SparkLabs Korea as a Venture Partner for this new fund and our accelerator fund. His experience and knowledge from the early days of Facebook is incredibly relevant and transferable to our founders. He will have such an impact throughout our portfolio, so we will value any time that he can provide as our new Venture Partner,” said Eugene Kim, Managing Partner at SparkLabs Korea and SparkLabs Group (http://www.sparklabsgroup.com).
About SparkLabs Korea SparkLabs Korea is a startup accelerator and venture capital fund founded by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs in South Korea. The focus is on startup companies from the Internet, online gaming, mobile, ecommerce, digital media, enterprise software and healthcare sectors. The mentorship-driven program is four months in length and provides funding, office space, a structure program and access to a top-tier network of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors and executives. For more information, please visit http://www.sparklabs.co.kr
Now, with the video personalization, users can personalize the intro and outro of videos. This is especially useful in the channel environment where channel partners can add their personal touch to the marketing and sales videos provided by the vendor’s corporate marketing team. Bridge allows partners to add a personal touch to the videos by editing the first and last frames to include partner logos and contact information. Plus, this is done automatically by the Bridge platform. This new addition to Bridge’s already existing powerful asset co-branding capabilities helps channel partners leverage the corporate brand and also build their local brand.
About Mindmatrix A next-gen PRM and partner marketing software provider, Mindmatrix has been focused on helping companies sell more, faster since its inception in 1998. A pioneer of sales (direct & indirect) and marketing enablement technology, today Mindmatrix is the only company offering a fully unified platform (Bridge ™) that connects and enables sales (direct & indirect), marketing, alliances and partner ecosystems. Through Bridge, Mindmatrix expands sales ecosystem enablement beyond its traditional boundaries to cover not just Sales Ecosystem Enablement, but also Partner Marketing and Multi-vendor Solutions Management.
About Bridge Bridge, from Mindmatrix, is a unified platform built to engage and enable your channel partners, alliances, and internal teams. Bridge takes the complexity out of sales ecosystem enablement by serving as a single platform with all the capabilities of a PRM Software, Partner Marketing Software and, partner and direct sales enablement software. Bridge drives sales ecosystem enablement beyond its traditional role to cover partner marketing and multi-vendor solutions management as well. Bridge provides a personalized collaboration platform that powers shared marketing, sales, and service experiences. Bridge is the only TRUE Partner Marketing Software with to, through, with and for-partner marketing tools to drive all of your partner marketing programs. With tools that facilitate guided selling, multi-vendor collaboration and easy revenue management, Mindmatrix Bridge is your powerful multi-vendor solutions hub.
Teamsters Call Out Waymo’s Poor Safety Record Outside Google Headquarters LOS ANGELES, Oct. 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — The Teamsters, labor leaders, public safety officials, and concerned citizens today held a rally outside of Google’s Southern California HQ to condemn the recent expansion…
Ninety-five percent of organizations provided education on organizational DEI&B policies and procedures. Of organizations that offered education on this topic, 20 percent said they did it well, 62 percent said they were doing OK but had room for improvement, and 18 percent said they struggled with educating employees on this topic.
Nearly three in four organizations use self-paced e-learning for DEI&B education, and 43 percent of organizations have employees do additional readings or use additional study materials after they participate in DEI&B education.
“DEI&B education should be a journey, not a one-stop destination,” the report said. “Organizations should use a variety of activities in DEI&B education and give participants assignments so they can continue learning even after the formal program is over.” ATD recommends continuing to make improvements to DEI&B education, getting buy-in from senior leaders, and offering DEI&B education using different modalities (in-person, e-learning, and so forth).
Other key findings include:
Less than half of organizations had a dedicated DEI&B function; however, when organizations had been offering DEI&B education for five or more years, 61 percent had a dedicated DEI&B function.
Forty percent of organizations provided a dedicated DEI&B education budget; however, when they had been offering education for five or more years, 52 percent had a budget.
The most common challenge organizations faced when implementing DEI&B education was that staff were not interested or didn’t want to take time to participate.
The research surveyed 1,048 talent development professionals and focused on how organizations were providing education opportunities, DEI&B budgets, the challenges associated with offering DEI&B programs, and the differences between organizations that had DEI&B programs and those that did not.
A free webinar on the report will take place November 21 at 2 p.m.
About ATD
The Association for Talent Development (ATD) is the world’s largest professional membership organization supporting those who develop the knowledge and skills of employees, improve performance, and help to achieve results for the organizations they serve. Established in 1943, the association was known as the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD).
ATD’s members come from more than 100 countries and work in public and private organizations in every industry sector. ATD supports talent development professionals who gather locally in volunteer-led US chapters, international member networks, and with international strategic partners.
ATLANTA, Oct. 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Bark Technologies, a global leader in the digital safety space for children, was named to TIME’s Best Inventions List of 2023 for its most recent product launch, the Bark Phone for kids. TIME’s Best Inventions list features 200 extraordinary…
Rugged and Portable: Designed to be waterproof and resilient to various climates, Butterfly is your trusted companion for environmental insights on the go.
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Comprehensive Monitoring: Beyond mere numbers, Butterfly offers a deeper understanding of eight (8) environmental parameters, guiding you towards informed decisions.
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About Hidden Brain
Hidden Brain is a leading global Internet of Things & Sensing company, boasting multi-disciplinary engineering expertise complemented by advanced internal manufacturing capabilities. The company has been at the forefront of introducing a modular, ultra-low power, intelligent framework that equips sensors with unparalleled intelligence and autonomy at the edge. This innovative open architecture provides robust building blocks that rapidly bring to life industry-first user experiences. These experiences are derived from insights gathered from machines, the environment, plants, animals, humans, and more.
Dive into a world of informed environmental well-being with Butterfly. Explore more at Hidden Brain’s official website.
