Melissa Mangold, left, with Bernice Hudler, assistant production manager. (Photo Provided.)

Casco can’t make ventilators, but we can supply the soft goods needed to outfit additional ICU beds and deliver them to healthcare facilities.

CINCINNATI (PRWEB)
March 22, 2020

Casco Manufacturing Solutions of Cincinnati has the capability to help the nation by supplying needed medical soft goods during the COVID-19 pandemic, says CEO Melissa Mangold.

And while Casco is a small shop with 40 employees, it’s one of only a handful of soft goods manufacturers left in the U.S. today. It also has the capability to ramp up production and deliver finished products within a few days.

“If it involves a piece of fabric, we can make it,” said Mangold. “I hear in the news that we’ll need additional hospital beds across the country. Casco can’t make ventilators, but we can supply the soft goods needed to outfit additional ICU beds and deliver them to healthcare facilities.”

Casco can also manufacture personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, such as gowns and booties, as well as provide its usual line of mattresses, replacement covers, stretcher pads, and OR table pads.

Casco continues to fill customer orders during the pandemic and can supply hospitals, nursing homes, and healthcare facilities, as well as individual orders. Large orders can be delivered within a few days, and smaller orders can be drop-shipped.

The 60-year-old, woman-owned business has in place stringent cleaning and washing procedures for both its industrial sewing machine operators and front office employees. It follows the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and local boards of health guidelines on how to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

“At Casco, we are a family, and in the spirit of loving and helping others, we go to work every day knowing we’re improving the comfort of health-impaired people who need our products,” said Mangold.

Team members are encouraged to closely monitor their health and well-being, and are asked to stay at home if they, or someone in their household becomes ill. The company has also suspended business air travel for team members through April 30 and is recommending virtual meetings and conference calls in place of face-to-face meetings.

“We’ve impressed upon our employees the current state of emergency and they understand the CDC’s recommendations regarding proper hand-washing techniques and adequately sanitized surfaces,” said Mangold. “We know how urgent it is that we supply the nation for a possible surge in COVID-19 cases. But we’re also extremely proud of our work and want government and private healthcare supply organizations to know we are here and ready to be of service.”

Casco is an original equipment manufacturer specializing in cutting, sealing, and sewing top-quality products for soft goods industry leaders. It manufactures its own C-Matt hospital line of mattresses and covers, and the Casco Prevention Plus Pad, a wheelchair pad designed to help eliminate “hot spots” for wheelchair patients to prevent, as well as heal pressure injuries.

For more information about Casco Manufacturing Solutions products, visit http://www.cascomfg.com or call Casco assistant general manager Jeff Hummeldorf at (513) 681-0003.

Contact: Melissa Mangold

Email: inquiries@cascomfg.com

Phone: (513) 681-0003

About Casco Manufacturing Solutions:

Casco Manufacturing Solutions of Cincinnati is a third-generation, family-owned and certified, woman-owned manufacturer. It manufactures soft goods for industry leaders in institutional, healthcare, government, outdoor and custom manufacturing markets and for private labels. Some of its products include hospital mattresses, C-Matt™ Replacement mattresses, mattress covers and stretcher pads.

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BOSTON (PRWEB)
March 19, 2020

Dr. Nohadani is an optimization and machine learning scientist with a proven track record of developing algorithms and solutions for big-data environments affected by uncertainty and subjected to complex risk measures. He sits down to talk about how the latest innovations in data science provide plan sponsors with powerful new tools that help improve the visibility and analysis of their data and prescribe actions to improve their health plan.

1. What was your role prior to coming to Benefits Science Technologies?

A: Most recently, I worked as an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. In my research group, we studied dynamic optimization and analytics under uncertainty and risk, with applications in healthcare, supply chain management, analytics, and technology. In particular, we focused on data-driven dynamic systems that rely on human interaction or have decision-makers with complex risk requirements. I received my MS degree in physics from the University of Bonn, Germany and my Ph.D. in physics from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. I then joined the Operations Research Center at MIT as a postdoctoral researcher, developing novel robust optimization algorithms. As a research fellow and instructor at the Department of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School’s Massachusetts General Hospital, I conducted mathematical research on cancer treatment.

2. What is your role at BST?

A: I lead our data science team of highly talented Ph.Ds. and MSs., who work on core components of our products. Our research team integrates the cutting-edge developments from the scientific communities of optimization and machine learning with the requirements of practitioners to create methods and ultimately products that empower data-driven decisions beyond individual expertise. We leverage the newest research findings to not only analyze the plethora of data sources at BST but also provide predictive and – more importantly – prescriptive insights. This allows for optimal resource allocation and targeted treatments in a timely fashion while maintaining costs.

3. You’ve had a pretty varied career path, what attracted you to BST?

A: My goal as a data scientist is to push the boundaries of science and technology in order to expand our knowledge and to create solutions that affect the world positively. This endeavor typically requires three components: exposure to relevant problems, proximity to cutting-edge science, and access to the real-world, e.g., through observation and data. I have pursued this goal in academic settings for a number of years and realized that while the first two components are available, the access to real-world data is limited. Alternatively, many private organizations pose relevant questions and have access to observations but are often not closely connected to the newest scientific discoveries. At Benefits Science, I was delighted to find a productive combination of all three components in a unique setting as a research-driven endeavor with a mature business model, providing the ideal format to innovate for real-world settings. Moreover, the societal relevance of healthcare elevates the motivation on a personal level and its economic impact promises transformation.

4. Where do you see these capabilities being applied in the healthcare decision space?

A: Benefit plan design is traditionally centered on the expertise of decision-makers. Given the complexity of these products and possible combinations, plan designers resort to last year’s choices to inform the next designs in an iterative fashion. At BST, human expertise is built into an algorithm that leverages all data to provide the optimal design that meets all desired criteria while minimizing costs. BST’s technology is able to efficiently solve large-scale mathematical robust optimization problems that were not possible before. Similarly, risk management is currently guided by broad economic trend analysis and is rarely tailored to the studied cohort. At BST, cohort related factors are also accounted for to not only predict future risk factors of individual members but also to prescribe which proactive steps could advance members’ health and mitigate risks. This could only be made possible at BST by integrating cutting-edge machine learning techniques with the newest optimization algorithms.

5. Interesting, can you give a specific example of how that works?

A: Employers often offer additional wellness and preventive benefits. However, budgetary considerations constrain the portfolio of these benefits. The prescriptive nature of BST’s technologies allows us to optimally tailor the portfolio to a subgroup of employees who have different needs, instead of the current one-size-fits-all approach. For example, members with musculoskeletal problems will be distinguished from those who require dietary support and our methods would help employers best address those needs while maintaining budgets. Moreover, we leverage past performance data to recommend the set of providers who would optimally improve health outcomes.

6. How do you see these types of advancements impacting the future of healthcare analysis?

A: All aspects of healthcare-related decision making, from medicine, delivery, policy, supply chains, and economics are becoming increasingly more data-driven. At BST, we are developing solutions that affect many of these directions. Since accuracy, scalability, and interpretability is at the core of our research and products, I believe we are well equipped to address future challenges. For example, our interpretable care pathways are trained with past data and informed by experts’ knowledge, hence well positioned to curb the increasing occurrence of diabetes in a proactive fashion, improving patient’s health, reshaping treatment schedules, and managing costs. The abundance of data and the emergence of powerful methodologies makes it an exciting time to be a data scientist in healthcare.

About Benefits Science Technologies

BST provides data analytics software/analysis to help manage the risk of self-funded health plans. Plan holders improve their connection to data, empowering optimal decisions to control costs, and improve the quality of care for plan members. The company distributes these capabilities to employers directly, through brokers/consultants, or by association with carriers (stop-loss and voluntary benefits providers), benefits administrators, professional employer organizations, third party administrators, pharmacy benefit managers, and/or cost-containment providers.

Founded in 2012, the company is recognized as a world-leading research and applied science team, developing advanced analytics and robust optimization methodology for complex health insurance decisions. Our mission is to improve health outcomes while lowering costs by helping our clients uncover the details of their health plan – and providing actionable insights along with outcome predictions for the recommended decisions. Our strategy is to build world-class solutions based on cutting-edge scientific insights.

Media Contact

Benefits Science Technologies

Mark Hufham mhufham@benefitsscience.com

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LONDON (PRWEB)
March 19, 2020

Billon Group, innovator of a new type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that processes national currency and business documents with blockchain technologies, has concluded Series A financing with over $6 million of equity being issued to existing and new investors. Participants in this round were led by Billon CEO Wojtek Kostrzewa; investors in the round include FIS, Rising Tide, Mencey Capital, VCF III, existing investors and prominent international managers and experts.

The latest round brings the total funding raised by Billon to over $16 million of grants and equity as the company expands its DLT platform. With this new funding, Billon strengthened its board with the appointment of Wojtek Kostrzewa as CEO and Anand Phanse as CFO to complement the existing management team comprising of Andrzej Horoszczak, co-founder and chief technology officer, Robert Kaluza as chief operating officer, David Putts as chief growth officer and Jacek Figula serving as chief commercial officer.

“Series A funds will be used to scale existing use cases, respond to many new clients and to begin preparation for opening the platform further for third party developers and commercial partners,” said CEO Wojtek Kostrzewa. Commercial partners include FIS, Microsoft, the Polish Credit Bureau, Warta Insurance, Philip Morris and over a dozen clients in various stages of scaling.

The news of Billon’s Series A funding comes as national banks across the globe are actively seeking “cash-on-chain” blockchain architectures that comply with existing regulatory structures for digitized national currencies. Billon, as a registered e-money issuer in both the UK and Poland, is an industry leader in creating solutions levering its Distributed Digital Cash architecture, a system that meets existing payment requirements without modification.

Billon is also expanding its Trusted Document Management capabilities, which include the ability to secure complex data sets “on chain” and selectively share data elements, as opposed to architectures based on Ethereum or similar architectures which typically store documents off-chain with the full cost of back-up, and then link such documents to a hash, effectively failing to eliminate the legacy systems that DLT is intended to eliminate.

About Billon

Billon created the first enterprise DLT system unifying national currency transactions, document management, and identity management into a single architecture. The system solved the challenge of transacting micropayments at scale, and it also encrypts documents and data on-chain, unleashing the transformational capabilities of blockchain technologies in the regulated world. Billon’s high-performance DLT system is designed to deliver tangible business results in the areas of digitised cash, trusted documents and identity & data sharing.

Billon Group Ltd. was founded in the UK in 2015, following several years of R&D in Poland. Its unique DLT protocol has been supported by many R&D grants, including the EU Horizon 2020 program. Billon is licensed to issue electronic money by regulators in the UK and Poland and employs a global team of more than 90 people in its two offices in London and Warsaw.

Billon works to implement its technology commercially with leading business partners, such as FIS in the US and BIK (the Polish credit office) in Poland. In 2018, the company joined the FIS Venture Center accelerator, and won the Global FinTech Hackcelerator at the Singapore FinTech Festival, showcasing a solution to zero-cost blockchain micropayments. Most recently, Billon entered the Elevator Lab accelerator, qualifying to work with Raiffeisen Bank International on e-money transactions with digitised euro on DLT. For more information, visit http://www.billongroup.com.

Media Contacts:

Maciej Józefowicz

Head of PR & Communication

maciej.jozefowicz@billongroup.com

tel. 0048 734 443 023

In North America:

Nancy Broe

nbroe@fulltiltconsulting.com

tel. +1 (678) 230-9146

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Auticon logo

auticon has a tremendous opportunity to provide quality IT resourcing that delivers social benefit for a growing client list in the US.

DALLAS (PRWEB)
March 19, 2020

auticon, a company that employs adults on the autism spectrum as technology consultants, announced today that it has appointed David Aspinall as Chief Executive Officer of its Unites States territory. This key hire comes at a time when the global social benefit company is ramping up North American expansion, with new locations in Los Angeles, Toronto, Columbus, and Salt Lake City.

David Aspinall comes to auticon with experience as an executive in a Fortune 10 brand at AT&T, where he spent nearly 12 years, including time leading the telecommunication giant’s Canadian operations. David also served as Regional President, South for Sprint in Texas. Here he led a highly successful turnaround and growth of Sprint’s Enterprise business across 10 southern states. More recently, David worked as an operating executive with various Private Equity firms specializing in scaling businesses and revenue growth. With this focus on sales leadership and market expansion, David’s experience will be applied to auticon’s US market growth and recruitment of adults on the autism spectrum in the technology space.

David has an MBA from Texas Christian University M.J. Neeley School of Business and has a BA with Honors from The University of Sheffield.

Addressing the Global Tech-talent Gap

A severe gap in skilled technology labor is already slowing digital transformation at 54% of companies, according to management consulting firm, Korn Ferry in their report, “Future of Work.” Research suggests that in 2020, “the technology, media, and telecommunications industries may be short more than 1.1 million skilled workers globally.”

Autistic adults experience extraordinarily high employment deficits, with research indicating 85% of autistic adults are unemployed or under-employed within the mainstream labor market. This is often despite having college degrees and relevant experience in areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. auticon taps into this potential by employing autistic adults as technology consultants where they are supported with job coaches and project managers producing a win-win-win situation for clients, consultants, as well as society.

auticon offers exceptional quality work within the information technology industry. The company’s client services include business analytics, artificial intelligence, software development, cybersecurity, as well as quality assurance and testing. auticon provides two operating models in the United States for clients: the “remote model” where work is completed at auticon’s office locations; and the “on-site model” where the consultant works at the client office location.

auticon Group CEO Kurt Schöffer said, “David has an approach to growing businesses and scaling them for private equity that is highly relevant to our goals in the US. He shares our vision that social problems, such as low employment for workers on the autism spectrum, can be solved through applying the principles of business.”

David Aspinall commented, “auticon has a tremendous opportunity to provide quality IT resourcing that delivers social benefit for a growing client list in the US. The combination of remote and onsite capabilities allows for quality delivery of services in a manner that matches customer need. The principles of “conscious capitalism” allow us to be entrepreneurial and align around providing opportunity for adults on the autism spectrum.”

In February, auticon announced that it had received a capital investment of $2.95 million (USD) with a significant portion coming from new investors based out of the US and France as well as significant commitments from existing shareholders.

About auticon

With a high demand for data quality and flawless software development, auticon provides a

neurodiverse and agile workforce to improve our client’s IT projects. Our hybrid onsite and offsite teams utilize the cognitive benefits of autism to provide the sustained concentration and analytical mindset that makes us wired for success.

Our teams include fully-trained personnel specializing in software development, data analysis,

quality assurance and testing, automation engineering, and more.

auticon has international offices in Germany, United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Italy,

Australia and throughout the United Kingdom. Investors include Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Group Ltd., Felix and Susanne Porsche, Ananda Impact Ventures, Ferd AS, Yabeo Capital, and Ferst Capital Partners.

To learn more, visit http://www.auticon.us or follow auticon U.S. on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook.

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