Press Releases

NEW YORK, Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — As the private equity (PE) market continues to evolve 10 years after its 2007 peak, firms are seeing that the implementation of digital technologies have a dramatic impact on the ways that PE firms organize and execute at the firm level, according to the EY Global PE Watch 2018 report. These technologies include robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) and are having an intense effect driving value across firm’s portfolios.

Herb Engert, EY Global Private Equity Leader, says:

“While there are some similarities today to 2007, PE as a sector has undergone a significant transformation. Not only have the industry’s assets under management grown more than 80% over the last decade, but the way it drives value has evolved as well, with PE firms employing a wide range of models and resources to drive operational value creation.”

Helping their investees drive operational value creation and execute a holistic digital approach to their entire business is increasingly one of the most significant value drivers for PE firms of all types, regardless of their sector specialization, geography, strategy or size.

Ten years ago, the number of potential deal partners was far smaller than it is today; however, as limited partners (LPs) look to deploy more assets in private investments in cost-effective ways, interest and involvement of many institutional investors in co-investment and direct investment is increasing, giving PE firms more choices than before. During this time period, for example, club deals involving two or more PE sponsors accounted for 66% of all PE megadeals (deals of US$5b and larger). Today, about 33% of such deals are club deals; far more common are deals involving family offices, corporates and pension funds. Partnering with these entities provides a growing opportunity for PE firms to add value in today’s evolving market.

According to the report, when looking for new ways to partner, PE firms should look first to customers, including pension funds and family offices with specific industry expertise, speed to execute deals and the ability to add value to a deal in ways that other financial sponsor can’t. Firms should also look to partner with competitors as strategic investors. The investors can provide firms with the ability to leverage synergies and the ability to achieve larger deal sizes without forming a PE consortium where alignments may be more difficult.

Engert says: “A decade ago, operating resources were concentrated at larger firms. In the past few years, small and mid-market firms have been increasingly catching up. As firms look to more systematically and comprehensively create operational value, they should look at working with senior industry executives on a full-time or part-time basis and hiring outside functional experts with deep expertise across a range of competencies.”

The complete report is available here.

Notes to Editors

About EY

EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

This news release has been issued by EYGM Limited, a member of the global EY organization that also does not provide any services to clients.

How EY’s Global Private Equity Sector can help your business

Private equity firms, portfolio companies and investment funds face complex challenges. They are under pressure to deploy capital amid geopolitical uncertainty, increased competition, higher valuations and rising stakeholder expectations. Successful deals depend on the ability to move faster, drive rapid and strategic growth and create greater value throughout the transaction lifecycle. EY taps its global network to help source deal opportunities, and combines deep sector insights with the proven, innovative strategies that have guided the world’s fastest growing companies. Our clients discover powerful new ways to create unexpected paths to value — generating positive economic benefits for both investors and society. That’s the power of positive equity.

Lee Ann Farwell
EY Global Media Relations
+1 212 773 5728
lee.ann.farwell@ey.com

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/private-equity-sees-disruption-through-emerging-technologies-300590487.html

SOURCE EY

MENLO PARK, Calif., Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Astound, an enterprise software company applying machine learning and natural language processing to automate service and support, today announced its launch and $11.5 Million in Series A funding, co-led by Vertex Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners with participation from The Hive, Slack Fund, and Moment Ventures.

“Employee service has to change,” said Dan Turchin, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Astound (formerly Neva). “For as long as technology has been used inside of corporations, I don’t know anyone who gets excited when they need to call the help desk. We’re bringing the power of AI to global service organizations and helping deliver a radically better user experience.  We’re proud of the value we’re creating and excited to be launching with incredible customers like McDonald’s and adidas.”

Astound makes work life more efficient for employees at large enterprises by automating the resolution of routine support issues like password resets, application configuration, and network outages. Its AI platform uses machine learning and natural language processing to automate answers to common questions to reduce call volume up to 70 percent. In addition, this automation reduces mean time to resolution by up to 60 percent and cost per ticket from an average of $25 to $1.50.

Astound was co-founded by Dr. Naghi Prasad, CEO, who holds a PhD in artificial intelligence and has brought to market many successful data-driven enterprise software products in past roles, and Dan Turchin, Chief Product Officer, who has two decades of experience working with CIOs as an entrepreneur and product leader in data science for Enterprise Service Management.

“As every company becomes more dependent on technology, employee support is becoming business-essential,” states Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures. “Astound’s founding team possesses background in that uniquely positions them to address this need and transform the industry as we know it.”

The Astound AI platform includes the following apps:

• Predict: Automatically classifies tickets by category and assigns them to the correct agents, eliminating the error-prone task of manually reviewing and routing tickets.
• Advise: Surfaces, analyzes and correlates data from disparate systems of record to enrich tickets with relevant content, allowing support agents to quickly execute complex tasks and fully automate common requests.
• Answers: Fully-autonomous agents use natural language processing, understanding, and natural language generation to help employees interactively ask questions, submit incidents and order goods and services via voice, chat, web portals, and native apps
• Analyze: Predictive analytics dashboards provide insights to managers about service health based on historical data trends. Intuitive visualizations monitor business KPIs and show how AI-driven automation benefits employees.

About Astound
Astound is purpose-built for enterprise service management and automates answers to routine questions, accurately assigns & categorizes incidents, recommends the best resolutions, and delivers predictive analytics. Astound partners with leading enterprise IT software vendors like ServiceNow, Atlassian, and Salesforce to offer out of the box integrations with ITSM, knowledge management, Customer Service Management (CSM), and social collaboration solutions. Astound helps some of the most-respected organizations in the world reduce call volume, MTTR and support costs, while improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about Astound at www.astound.ai or follow the company on Twitter @astound_ai.

CONTACT:
Mike Moeller
408-439-4169
mike.moeller@aircoverpr.com

 

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/transforming-it-through-ai-driven-automation-astound-launches-and-announces-115-million-in-funding-300589952.html

SOURCE Astound

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — BMC, a global leader in IT solutions for the digital enterprise, today announced it has integrated AWS Service Catalog into the BMC service catalog, part of the BMC Digital Workplace solution, delivering one-click self-service to the products and services employees need to be productive. The collaboration builds on BMC’s existing efforts to help customers move enterprise workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) faster in a secure, low-risk, and cost-effective way. The BMC Digital Workplace solution becomes the single interface for customers to provision AWS as well as industry-leading multi-cloud management and IT service management solutions from BMC.  

“A key focus of our multi-cloud management strategy is to empower our customers to migrate and utilize cloud services easier and more confidently,” said Bill Berutti, President, Enterprise Solutions at BMC. “Integrating AWS Service Catalog into our service catalog, alongside BMC’s industry-leading solutions, reduces complexity and enables one-stop shopping for enterprise cloud service provisioning and management. We’re excited about this significant step in our relationship with AWS, and to showcase this integrated service catalog at AWS Sales Kickoff 2018.”

The average company has more than 20 catalogs for IT and business services, which typically results in an inefficient process requiring employees to separately search, select, and provision services from each catalog. The BMC Digital Workplace service catalog provides a “one-click” consumer-like experience by aggregating and managing apps and services across the enterprise in a centralized solution. By integrating AWS Service Catalog with the BMC Digital Workplace, companies can reduce catalog sprawl to improve workforce agility and employee productivity through integrated self-service.

“Our customers have been asking for easier access to enterprise service management tools to procure, deploy and manage their AWS cloud resources. Integration of AWS Service Catalog with BMC Digital Workplace will allow enterprise customers to migrate, govern, and manage all their AWS application portfolios on a single portal,” said Barry Russell, General Manager of Global Business Development, AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

AWS Service Catalog is designed to help organizations and employees to centrally manage commonly deployed IT services that are approved for use on AWS, including virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. AWS Service Catalog empowers users to quickly deploy only the approved IT services they need, enabling consistent governance and meeting compliance requirements.

BMC’s service catalog integration with AWS Service Catalog will be demonstrated on-stage at AWS Sales Kickoff 2018 in Las Vegas January 30 through February 2, 2018.

To learn more about BMC’s cloud management solutions, visit http://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/multi-cloud-management.html.  

About Amazon Web Services
For more than 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 100 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 49 Availability Zones (AZs) across 18 geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About BMC 
BMC is a global leader in innovative software solutions that enable businesses to transform into digital enterprises for the ultimate competitive advantage. Our Digital Enterprise Management solutions are designed to make digital business fast, seamless, and optimized from mainframe to mobile to cloud and beyond. BMC digital IT transforms 82 percent of the Fortune 500 and serves more than 10,000 customers worldwide.

BMC – Bring IT to Life
BMC, BMC Software, the BMC logo, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software Inc., are registered or pending registration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©Copyright 2018 BMC Software, Inc.

Media Contacts:

Amazon.com, Inc.
Media Hotline
Amazon-pr@amazon.com 
www.amazon.com/pr

BMC
Hotwire PR
Direct: +1 (347) 670-0437
Email: bmcus@hotwireglobal.com

 

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bmc-integrates-aws-service-catalog-with-bmc-digital-workplace-for-simplified-access-to-cloud-services-300590470.html

SOURCE BMC

SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Ivanti, the company that unifies IT to better manage and secure the digital workplace, and CrowdStrike, the leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection, today announced a strategic alliance that brings together next-generation antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR) with Ivanti’s multi-layered endpoint security solutions. Together they are leading the charge to converge endpoint management and endpoint security, helping companies that possess limited resources combat cyber threats efficiently and in real time.

The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform seamlessly integrates next-generation AV, EDR, managed threat hunting, threat intelligence and IT hygiene – powered through the cloud via a single lightweight agent. With this unique approach customers can prevent and detect never-before-seen threats and tailor security responses based on the severity of malicious behavior. CrowdStrike’s next-generation AV module, Falcon Prevent, prevents both malware and malware-free intrusions, filling the gap left by legacy antivirus solutions that primarily focus on malware.

Uniting the next-gen Falcon platform from CrowdStrike with security solutions from Ivanti is an appropriate response to today’s cyberattack trends. Ivanti delivers industry-leading solutions, integrating endpoint security controls that global experts agree create the highest barriers to real-world attacks (discovery, patch and privilege management, whitelisting, and secure configuration). With IT teams spending too much time managing security device sprawl, and Security teams suffering a well-documented labor shortage, Ivanti simplifies security with tools that target the biggest attack vectors with lauded prevention, detection, and response techniques.

“With more surface area to cover, more mission-critical assets to protect, and more sophisticated threats to defend against, IT Operations and Security teams must find a way to work together better to identify and protect vulnerable IT systems,” said Duane Newman, VP of Product Management and Marketing, Ivanti.  “Together, with CrowdStrike, we are helping our mutual customers reduce the attack surface and respond more quickly should a threat get through.”

The technology partnership between Ivanti and CrowdStrike will provide the following benefits to joint customers:

• Faster remediation of prioritized threats to keep the endpoints’ data protected
• Deeper protection and control over employees’ devices
• Better insight and visibility into security incidents and better time to resolution

“It’s vital to leverage advanced technologies to prevent and detect threats and provide insight, control and visibility into endpoints in real time,” said Matthew Polly, VP of Worldwide Business Development and Channels, CrowdStrike. “The partnership between CrowdStrike and Ivanti will help our customers pinpoint and remediate threats while improving both management and automation, so security teams can work in a more efficient and effective manner.”

About Ivanti

Ivanti unifies IT and Security Operations to better manage and secure the digital workplace. From PCs to mobile devices, VDI and the data center, Ivanti discovers IT assets on-premises and in the cloud, improves IT service delivery, and reduces risk with insights and automation. The company also helps organizations leverage modern technology in the warehouse and across the supply chain to improve delivery without modifying backend systems. Ivanti is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has offices all over the world. For more information, visit www.ivanti.com and follow @GoIvanti.

About CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike is the leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform offers instant visibility and protection across the enterprise and prevents attacks on endpoints on or off the network. CrowdStrike Falcon deploys in minutes to deliver actionable intelligence and real-time protection from Day One. It seamlessly unifies next-generation AV with best-in-class endpoint detection and response, backed by 24/7 managed hunting. Its cloud infrastructure and single-agent architecture take away complexity and add scalability, manageability, and speed.

CrowdStrike Falcon protects customers against all cyber attack types, using sophisticated signatureless AI and Indicator-of-Attack (IOA) based threat prevention to stop known and unknown threats in real time. Powered by the CrowdStrike Threat Graph™, Falcon instantly correlates over 78 billion security events a day from across the globe to immediately prevent and detect threats. Learn more at https://www.crowdstrike.com/ and follow us: Blog | Twitter.

Copyright © 2018 Ivanti. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2018 CrowdStrike, Inc. All rights reserved.

 

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ivanti-and-crowdstrike-forge-strategic-partnership-to-deliver-advanced-endpoint-security-300590426.html

SOURCE Ivanti

HERNDON, Va., Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Cynthia Izuno Macri, M.D. (CAPT MC USN-Retired) has joined the executive team at EagleForce Associates, Inc. as Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer.  She serves as the subject matter expert on strategic business initiatives in health care education, management, and delivery, clinical applicability, and integration of technology with current and emerging health care models with special emphasis on patient safety and institutional compliance.  She is also responsible for identifying, cultivating, and pursuing opportunities to collaborate with strategic business partners and academic institutions and communicating with local, state, and federal legislative officials and constituents to propel EagleForce Health’s cost-effective, agile, secure, patented advanced analytics solutions into all aspects of the healthcare industry.  Dr. Macri facilitates implementation of these solutions within a wide range of organizations serving diverse populations, ensuring compliance with all local, state and federal regulations and preserving the highest level of care.

Dr. Macri received her M.D. degree from Temple University School of Medicine.  A board-certified Obstetrician Gynecologist and Gynecologic Oncologist with 35-years of experience in the U.S. Navy, she earned a national reputation as a Women’s Cancer Specialist, surgeon, educator, and clinical researcher, focusing on cultural and technical proficiency, health literacy, social determinants of health, health disparities, population health, and cancer prevention and management.

Before joining EagleForce Health, Dr. Macri served as the Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) for diversity, using her strategic abilities to streamline and optimize a diverse workforce of over 300,000 active duty, reserve, and civilian personnel.  She led the Navy’s effort to improve Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) course and career awareness, particularly within diverse, multicultural, disadvantaged, and overlooked communities. As the Chief Strategist for the Navy’s 21st Century Sailor Office under the Chief of Naval Personnel (CNP), she crafted the Navy’s response to the Department of Defense (DoD) Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Policy and served on the Navy’s Population Health Advisory Board and the Psychological Health Advisory Board.

Dr. Macri currently sits on the Board of Directors of three veteran-centric non-profit organizations and the Steering Committee for the Asian American Health Initiative in Montgomery County.  She also volunteers as an attending physician for two free clinics in Maryland that serve the underserved population.  She is a certified Master Trainer in the Chronic Disease Self-Management (CDSMP), Diabetes (DSMP), and Chronic Pain Self-Management (CPSMP) Programs and teaches CDSMP and CPSMP at a transitional housing facility for homeless veterans in Baltimore.  In 2016, she was appointed by Governor Hogan to represent Congressional District 8 on the Maryland State Veterans Commission. Dr. Macri is a competitive soccer player and will represent Northern Virginia in the upcoming 2018 U.S. Adult Amateur Soccer Association national championships in Bellingham, Washington.

About EagleForce Health, LLC

EagleForce Health is an Advanced Analytics Company that established its pedigree in the Defense and Intelligence sector of the government solving some of the country’s biggest challenges. The Company has many patents in the area of eligibility and predictive analytics which it employs in solving some of healthcare’s most difficult problems with respect to disparate data interoperability by utilizing artificial intelligence, neural computing and enhanced data modeling. For more information, please contact us or visit our website:

www.TheEagleForce.net

 

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eagleforce-health-appoints-senior-vice-president-and-chief-medical-officer-300590354.html

SOURCE EagleForce Health, LLC

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Metadata (http://www.metadata.io), the patented platform for closed-loop account based marketing, announced it has joined the Marketo® Accelerate ecosystem, the MarTech industry’s first partner accelerator. The Metadata platform integrates into the Marketo Engagement Platform™ to enable marketers to create and deliver personalized experiences to their customers across all channels throughout the buyer’s journey.

“Metadata is excited to be partnering with Marketo, the world leader in engagement marketing,” said Gil Allouche, Founder and CEO at Metadata.io. “Our smart integration enables Marketo clients to access the largest B2B prospect database of segmentation and multivariate advertising capabilities, allowing them to execute true closed-loop account-based marketing programs at scale.”

“The Marketo Accelerate program provides emerging companies with a tailored program to grow their business with Marketo,” said Shai Alfandary, vice president, global head of ISVs and LaunchPoint® ecosystem, Marketo. “The Metadata platform’s unique AI operator greatly expands campaign execution capabilities available to marketing teams to generate pipeline, making them a great fit for the Accelerate program.”

Announced in 2017, Marketo Accelerate is a part of Marketo’s robust, best-in-class partner ecosystem, LaunchPoint. The program provides partners with full access to the Marketo Engagement Platform, sales enablement activities, co-marketing activities, and more to drive growth for their businesses.

To learn more about Marketo Accelerate, please click here.

The Metadata platform is powering account based marketing campaigns at leading B2B technology firms including Nutanix, Cisco, Mulesoft, Tipalti, Infoblox and many others. Since 2015, Metadata’s mission is to free B2B marketing teams from manual marketing ops work, employing an artificial intelligence (AI) operator that uses automated, multivariate experimentation to provide a predictable and scalable flow of leads and accelerate pipeline growth.

About Metadata

Metadata is a next generation account-based targeting platform, completely automated and operated by Artificial Intelligence. The Metadata A.I. operator learns your ideal customer profiles based on historical CRM data, then builds audiences of your target customers and personas and deploys paid media campaigns automatically to deliver a predictable, qualified inbound lead flow. Metadata clients include Nutanix, Amdocs, Intel, Mulesoft, Infoblox and many others. For more information about Metadata, visit www.metadata.io.

Media Contact

Gil Allouche
Phone: 650.919.3131
Email: gil@metadata.io

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/metadata-joins-the-marketo-accelerate-partner-ecosystem-300590228.html

SOURCE Metadata, Inc.

DENVER, Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Recondo Technology is pleased to announce it has earned the 2018 Best in KLAS ranking for the Patient Access category. Recondo’s automated revenue cycle management solutions help hospitals and healthcare systems process large volumes of queries to payers at unprecedented scale and speed by leveraging touchless processing, helping these providers brings millions of dollars in revenue back to the bottom line.

“On behalf of the hardworking and talented team at Recondo Technology, I want to express our gratitude to our customers for partnering in Recondo’s vision to reinvent and automate the hospital’s revenue cycle,” said Jay Deady, CEO of Recondo Technology.

Deady went on to further describe this vision.

“Beginning in 2015, we partnered with our leading clients to implement a three-year improvement plan focused on key attributes–highly reliable, innovative SaaS software and revenue cycle content; a new client implementation and support model implemented by our COO, Perry Sweet and team; and leading-edge integration of actionable intelligence delivered directly into the workflow of our clients’ revenue cycle platforms of choice, such as Epic and others,” Deady said.

He added, “Given that KLAS rankings are based on objective customer feedback, clearly this vision has been successfully achieved in actual practice.”

KLAS ranking puts touchless automation in the spotlight

Communicating with healthcare insurance companies is a manual and time-consuming process for providers, with many relying on armies of internal or outsourced staff to keep up. In response, a growing number of providers are turning to automation to carry out these transactions with payers—using automated solutions to verify a patient’s coverage for services and the patient’s financial responsibility; obtain prior authorizations for services; and confirm the approved or denied status of claims.

The efficiency of automating these revenue cycle transactions is quickly realized. In just one patient access example, Recondo customers experienced a 100 percent increase in account processing throughput using AuthInitiate, the latest addition to Recondo’s Authorization-Denial Prevention suite.

“Hospitals that automate revenue cycle management functions routinely recoup tens of millions of dollars in revenue. For example, St. Francis Hospital increased point-of-service collections by $4 million after deploying our patient estimation solution.  In another example, by automating claim status verification with our ClaimStatusPlus™ solution, Avera Health freed $2.1 million from over-aging accounts,” Deady noted.

Recondo’s automated solutions have proven to be so effective for providers, the company experienced an almost 40 percent year-over-year growth in bookings in 2017 following similar growth in 2016. ClaimStatusPlus™, the industry’s leading automation tool for touchless claims follow-up, has helped significantly drive that growth with new customers including Bons Secours, University of Colorado Health and Stanford Health Care. Additional new Recondo customers include St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, USC Health, Banner Health, Stormont Vail and Ensemble Health Partners.  

Automation is on the cusp of becoming mainstream in the healthcare revenue cycle industry, thanks in large part to the success of solutions like Recondo’s and the focus on automation by prestigious research organizations such as KLAS.

Additional accolades

The recognition from KLAS follows closely on the heels of Recondo’s full suite of revenue cycle solutions being selected as a “best-in-class” platform vendor for the Revenue Cycle Innovation Center by Baker Tilly, a leading full-service consulting and advisory firm.  

The center was formed by Baker Tilly to help its clients break the pattern of commonly under-performing revenue cycle programs that are failing to deliver on expected ROIs in the ever-changing healthcare environment. Having identified automation as a key strategy to overhaul such programs, Baker Tilly sought the most innovative platform SaaS vendor in healthcare revenue cycle automation—and found it in Recondo Technology.

In 2017, Recondo was also recognized by Black Book Research as one of the top three leaders in revenue cycle management software.

Deady concluded by noting that in the near future, the most effective automation tools will incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities like robotic process automation, machine learning, and natural language processing.

“Our own solutions are now deploying these capabilities to create a truly ‘touchless’ financial clearance. Look out for more great news for Recondo and our customers in the coming months,” Deady said.

For the full “2018 Best in KLAS: Software & Services” report, visit: https://klasresearch.com/report/2018-best-in-klas-software-and-services/1253

About KLAS

KLAS is a data-driven company on a mission to improve the world’s healthcare by enabling provider and payer voices to be heard and counted. Working with thousands of healthcare professionals, KLAS collects insights on software, services and medical equipment to deliver reports, trending data and statistical overviews. KLAS data is accurate, honest and impartial. The research directly reflects the voice of healthcare professionals and acts as a catalyst for improving-vendor performance. To learn more about KLAS and the insights we provide, visit www.KLASresearch.com.

About Recondo Technology

Recondo’s cloud-based solutions deliver industry leading automated, accurate, and actionable financial clarity to all participants within the healthcare revenue cycle. Recognized by Black Book Research as one of the top three leaders in revenue cycle management software, Recondo empowers more than 900 hospitals with solutions that connect providers, payers, and patients to ensure proper payments across the care continuum. The company’s patented software and expertise streamline operations and allow providers to be paid more, faster, and at a cheaper cost.  Recondo brings efficiencies and cost savings to patient access through to payment processing—a continuum today where inaccuracy and inefficiencies currently cost U.S. healthcare a staggering $480 billion per year. Learn more at www.recondotech.com.

Media contact:

Stephanie Janard
Amendola Communications for Recondo Technology
sjanard@acmarketingpr.com
704.418.9874

 

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/recondo-technology-named-2018-best-in-klas-for-patient-access-300590351.html

SOURCE Recondo Technology

CARY, N.C., Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — SAS, the leader in analytics, is making it easier for customers to build artificial intelligence (AI) solutions by leveraging machine learning, deep learning, text analytics, forecasting and statistics. Its latest SAS^® Platform release includes a new offering, SAS Visual Text Analytics, and significant enhancements to SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning. They both take advantage of the new capabilities available in SAS^® Viya^®.

Recent adopters of SAS Viya analytics products include the American Red Cross; Cisco; Klingel Group, the second-largest traditional online fashion and apparel company in Germany, represented in 12 European countries; and Munich Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers.

What’s New?

• SAS Visual Text Analytics extracts value from unstructured data using the combined power of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and linguistic rules. It addresses business challenges across industries, including managing and interpreting notes, assessing risk and fraud, and using customer feedback for early detection of problems. Capabilities of SAS Visual Text Analytics include text mining, contextual extraction, categorization, sentiment analysis and search within a modern and flexible framework. The software allows users to prepare data for analysis, visually explore topics, build text models and deploy them within existing systems or business processes. Users can quickly analyze large volumes of data using predefined templates and integrate the output of text analytics with other machine learning and forecasting techniques.

• The new release of SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning offers an end-to-end visual environment that covers all aspects of machine learning and deep learning – from data access and data wrangling to sophisticated model building and deployment. In-memory, distributed processing provides faster answers to critical business questions and more efficient use of valuable data and skilled staff. It also supports programming from popular open source languages like Python and R.

• One of the hallmarks of this release of the SAS Platform is a web interface that unifies the entire analytics life cycle, helping cross-divisional teams collaborate. Now, all activity – from data preparation, to interactive discovery and exploration to model building and deployment – is supported from a single, visual interface. This tightly integrated environment speeds the production of modern machine learning algorithms that can, for example, build more profitable customer relationships, fight fraud and effectively manage risk.

“With SAS combining advanced analytics, model deployment, data preparation and visualization into one platform, users are now able to go through all the stages of the analytics process without the need to switch from software product to product,” said Dan Vesset, Group Vice President for Analytics and Information Management Research at IDC. “After previewing the SAS Platform updates, incorporating the latest statistical, machine learning, deep learning and text analysis algorithms and supporting open source languages, it’s apparent that SAS is going to continue as a leading analytics as well as cognitive/AI platform provider for years to come.”

Munich Re enables more users, expands deep learning capabilities
“As an early adopter, Munich Re has played a key role in helping us shape our new solutions and platform,” said Saurabh Gupta, Director of Analytics Products at SAS. “While working with them, we heard that the new release unifies their analytics infrastructure and enables users of varying skill sets to collaborate to solve the organization’s challenges faster. Customer feedback has always been instrumental in helping SAS release world-class products.”

As a reinsurer with worldwide operations, Munich Re has access to massive amounts of data that are pulled into a centralized environment. Being able to use SAS to run sophisticated machine learning algorithms on big data within a collaborative user interface will allow the company to gain analytic insights to quickly address business challenges and serve clients. Plus, having access to embedded AI capabilities and the latest deep learning algorithms helps the company to stay at the leading edge of what is possible with analytics.

“The newest version of SAS allows all our users to quickly get started and collaborate with a unified and visual interface,” said Wolfgang Hauner, Chief Data Officer at Munich Re. “We like that it allows those who aren’t as familiar with SAS to code in Python and R and run the same actions in the same platform. It is both in tune with the end-to-end needs of an advanced data scientist and is also convenient for beginners. This ability to appeal to data scientists and non-coders will allow multiple users and teams to explore and analyze the same data, making the data discovery and model-building process more collaborative.”

Learn more about SAS Visual Text Analytics and SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative software and services, SAS empowers and inspires customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW®.

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2018 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-enriches-ai-offerings-with-new-machine-learning-and-natural-language-processing-software-300590327.html

SOURCE SAS

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — New data analysis confirms that consistent usage of Stop, Breathe & Think mindfulness and meditation activities over time yields significant mental health results, including decreased anxiety and increased positive emotion.

Dr. Nicholas J. Schork, a prominent biostatistician and health data expert at UC San Diego, analyzed data from over 10,000 users of the popular emotional wellness app Stop, Breathe & Think over a 13-month period. The results were dramatic, with an impact as early as the first session.

“This analysis paints a beautiful, promising picture for everyone in the greater community working alongside us to understand and apply the maximum benefits of mindfulness, meditation and digital therapeutics,” commented Stop Breathe & Think Co-Founder and President Jamie Price. “Our mission is to make these practices as accessible and routine as physical exercise, and with this information, we are also being shown that users are reaping benefits every bit as tangible as those from physical exercise.” 

Anxiety is the number one reported problem users endorse in the app, reported twice as much as the next problem area. The sustained long-term benefits of using the unique check-in feature paired with mindfulness activities averaging five minutes also included improved mood overall.

• 52% of people come into the first pre-activity check in saying they are anxious
• After just 10 sessions, baseline anxiety improved with 41% of users reporting feeling anxious
• After 100 sessions, baseline anxiety continued to improve with just 28% of users reporting feeling anxious (a 46% improvement in anxiety)
• With only 30% of users reporting feeling predominantly positive prior to meditating for the first time, that percentage more than doubled to 78% immediately after their first session.
• Baseline sentiment continues to improve over time and with length of usage.

Users of Stop, Breathe & Think complete both a pre- and post-meditation check-in to reflect on their baseline mental, physical and emotional wellbeing, and are then provided with short activities tailored to that information. This unique feature allowed researchers to examine both the immediate and long-term changes in users’ emotional states. Stop, Breathe & Think has collected over 11 million emotional check-ins to date. The analysis was based on responses from May 1, 2016, and June 30, 2017, from 10,000 users who completed ten or more sessions with the app.

Schork presented aspects of his findings at the MIT Media Lab’s Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Development to Improve Public Health. Schork, who serves as Distinguished Professor of Quantitative Medicine at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, Director of Human Biology at the J. Craig Venter Institute, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Diego, is currently preparing the analysis for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. He also serves on the Stop, Breathe & Think scientific advisory board.

“As we were developing this app, we of course became very familiar with the studies establishing the positive brain level effects of meditation and mindfulness,” said Julie Campistron, CEO of Stop, Breathe & Think. “This data analysis offers additional insight because it was culled in real time in the real world, and looks at both short-term and cumulative effects of meditation using the Stop, Breathe & Think platform and methods. In an age of such widespread anxiety, especially with younger generations, we are thrilled that our Stop Breathe & Think users are experiencing this sustained improvement in their sense of wellbeing, and excited about what this data says about the general efficacy of long-term emotional wellness programs. We continue to explore factors that contribute to people’s sense of wellbeing and how they might impact their experience with the app.”

“The science on mindfulness to promote emotional well-being continues to show positive benefits, even when delivery is via mobile devices and apps,” shared Susan Smalley, Ph.D., co-author of the book, Fully Present, and head of the Stop, Breathe & Think Scientific Advisory Board. “With this analysis, we can look at benefits across large numbers of people and over time. With SBT’s initial data analysis of 10,000 users, we see well-being improve and anxiety decrease in the first session, but even more interesting, the change is steady over time, even with short practice sessions. While additional research is needed, including controlled trials to determine the source of this change, the initial data provide intriguing support that app delivery of emotional well-being practices is feasible and quite useful.”

About Stop, Breathe & Think
Stop, Breathe & Think is the first emotional wellness platform for the “under 25” generation, with the mission to help kids, teens and young adults build the emotional strength to tackle life’s ups and downs. The 5-star-rated app, winner of the 2017 Webby People’s Voice Award for Best Health App, is paving the way to everyday emotional wellness with bite-size personalized content and activities based on user emotions. Co-Founded by Jamie Price and Julie Campistron, Stop, Breathe & Think has reached a large consumer appeal with over 3M organic downloads. Its personalized experience has been praised by users and media and has allowed the team to build the world’s largest database of real life emotional data with over 11M emotional check-ins to date. That data is unequivocally proving the efficacy of the app, especially as it relates to stress and anxiety. Stop, Breathe & Think was born out of Tools for Peace (TFP), a non-profit dedicated teaching mindfulness and meditation to inner city teens. Ten percent of Stop Breathe & Think’s net sales work to fund TFP and help further this mission. Stop, Breathe & Think is available on iOS, Android, Alexa and Slack and can be accessed here:http://www.stopbreathethink.com

PR Contact: 
Rebecca Reinbold
Shane Strategies
Rebecca@RebeccaReinbold.com
(310) 383-1051

 

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/largest-study-of-app-delivery-of-mindfulness-practices-finds-anxiety-decreased-by-46-300589784.html

SOURCE Stop, Breathe & Think