Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Former Asda CEO calls for end to plastic packaging
 The former boss of Asda is calling for supermarkets to stop using plastic packaging saying billions of pounds of investment in recycling has failed to resolve the world’s plastic proliferation crisis.

Andy Clarke, CEO of one of Britain’s biggest supermarket chains for six years, said the only solution was for retailers to reject plastic entirely in favour of more sustainable alternatives like paper, steel, glass and aluminium.

“Go into any supermarket in the country and you will be met by a wall of technicolour plastic,” Clarke said. “Be it fruit and veg or meat and dairy, plastic encases virtually everything we buy.

‘All plastic packaging will reach landfill or the bottom of the ocean sooner or later,’ says Andy Clarke. Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

“Regardless of how much is invested in Britain’s recycling infrastructure, virtually all plastic packaging will reach landfill or the bottom of the ocean sooner or later. Once there, it will remain on the earth for centuries.

“It is vital that the UK packaging industry and supermarkets work together to turn off the tap.”

Efforts to recycle more plastic and “a neverending stream of initiatives” – many of which Clarke oversaw while at Asda – has failed to stem the plastic flow and it is clear a more radical approach is needed, said Clarke, who stood down as Asda CEO last year.

“We want a future for our grandchildren which is as far as possible plastic-free,” he said. “We also know that consumers want the same thing and with heightened public awareness of the dire consequences of unfettered plastic pollution, they are fully in support of the industry’s efforts to make a meaningful change.”

Clarke said supermarkets should create plastic-free aisles to cater for their customers’ demands and to showcase the wealth of alternatives to plastic including innovations like grass paper. He also backed the campaign A plastic planet as a measure to spread the use of alternative packaging.

The world’s plastic binge shows no signs of halting. A Guardian investigation this year established that consumers around the world buy a million plastic bottles a minute and plastic production is set to double in the next 20 years and quadruple by 2050.

In the UK less than a third (29%) of the 5m tonnes of plastic used each year is recovered and recycled. Across the world more than 8m tonnes of plastic leaks into the oceans and a recent study found that billions of people globally are drinking water contaminated by plastic.

Clarke said he has witnessed how much supermarkets have done to try to promote recycling, investing billions to try to increase the amount of recycled plastic they use, but still these measures have failed to reduce the scale of plastic pollution.

Attempts to use thinner plastic milk bottles containing more recycled material at Asda, he said, led to bottles bursting and creating more food waste. In the end the supermarket went back to the original bottles.

“Unlike materials like aluminium and glass, plastic packaging cannot be recycled ad infinitum. Most items of plastic packaging can only be recycled twice before they become unusable,” he said.

Clarke highlighted a Populus poll earlier this year which showed four out of five people questioned were concerned about the amount of plastic packaging thrown away in the UK and 91% wanted plastic-free aisles in supermarkets.

He called for Asda and other supermarkets to use the host of new products coming on the market to cut plastic pollution. “Despite more than a decade of concerted supermarket action on this issue, globally we are still dumping in excess of 8m tonnes of plastic in the ocean each year,” said Clarke.

“We have been able to recycle plastic for decades yet it remains a scourge on the planet. Recycling will never offer a durable solution to the plastic crisis – we simply have to use less plastic in the first place.”

Greenpeace Oceans campaigner Tisha Brown said: “With ocean plastic pollution ending up in everything from sea salt to sea gulls to our seafood, and many shoppers frustrated with the amount of unnecessary plastic packaging they encounter at their local supermarket, now would be a very good time for Asda, or any supermarket, to give shoppers the option of opting out.

“The great thing about a plastic-free isle is that it could encourage innovation in packaging many different products, and save environmentally minded consumers the hassle of hunting for environmentally friendly choices across the store.”

Between 5m and 13m tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, and by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, according to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium recently calculated people who eat seafood ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year. Last August, the results of a study by Plymouth University reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish.

Output: The former CEO of Asda has called on supermarkets to abandon plastic packaging. Andy Clarke said that investing billions of pounds in recycling has failed to solve the growing problem of plastic waste and that the only option was for retailers to adopt packaging made from more sustainable alternatives including aluminium, glass, paper and steel. Clarke added that, despite recycling, “virtually all plastic packaging will reach landfill or the bottom of the ocean sooner or later”. Clarke expressed support for the A Plastic Planet campaign, which is calling for the creation of plastic-free aisles in supermarkets.


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Aviation biofuels plan could wipe out rainforests, say eco groups
 A new plan to accelerate production of biofuels for passenger planes has drawn stinging criticism from environmentalists who argue that most of the world’s rainforests might have to be cleared to produce the necessary crops.

Aviation is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions, with an 8% leap reported in Europe last year and a global fourfold increase in CO2 pollution expected by 2050.

To rein this back, the industry has promised carbon neutral growth by 2020 – to be met by biofuels, if a blueprint is approved at an International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) conference in Mexico City tomorrow.

The “green jet fuel” plan would ramp up the use of aviation biofuels to 5m tonnes a year by 2025, and 285m tonnes by 2050 – enough to cover half of overall demand for international aviation fuel.

But this is also three times more biofuels than the world currently produces, and advanced biofuels are still at too early a stage of development to make up the difference.

Environmentalists say that the most credible alternative fuel source would be hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), even though this would probably trigger a boom in palm oil plantations and a corresponding spike in deforestation.

Klaus Schenk of Rainforest Rescue said: “Citizens around the world are very concerned about burning palm oil in planes. The vast use of palm oil for aviation biofuels would destroy the world’s rainforests, the basis of life for local people and the habitats of endangered species such as orangutans. We urge Icao to scrap its misguided biofuels plan.”

It is impossible to quantify the precise extent of deforestation that the proposal could cause, but based on the Malaysian Palm Oil Council’s crude palm oil yields and Total conversion figures, Biofuelwatch estimate that 82.3m hectares of land (316,603 sq miles) would be needed to meet the target, if it were sourced from palm oil alone. That is more than three times the size of the UK.

Carlos Calvo Ambel, a spokesman for Transport and Environment, said: “Most biofuels are worse for the climate than jet fuel. Quality should always go before quantity. Establishing a goal even before the rules are set out is putting the cart before the horse. The European experience has been that biofuels targets sucked in palm oil exports whose emissions were far greater than those of fossil fuels.”

T&E, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth are among nearly 100 environmental groups protesting the proposal, while 181,000 people have signed a petition calling for the initiative to be scrapped.

Inside the conference hall, several states are also opposing the biofuels pitch which, if passed, is expected to go on to an Icao assembly for formal adoption within two years.

Brazil and Indonesia strongly support the plan but China has questioned its feasibility, the EU wants more robust sustainability criteria, and the US says it will not support globally coordinated emissions reductions targets.

An industry proposal to limit the biofuels target to 2025 is one possible compromise, but others may emerge before the plan is put to a vote.

Almuth Ernsting, a spokeswoman for Biofuelwatch, said the current proposed target was “so huge that it would be unlikely to be fulfilled – but you could still have massive negative impacts from much smaller uses of palm oil”.

Within four years of the EU setting a binding target to source 10% of its transport fuel from renewable sources in 2009, studies show that European investors had bought 6m hectares of land for biofuels production in sub-Saharan Africa.

The EU took very little of its biofuel feedstock from Africa in the end, but the use of palm oil from elsewhere for biodiesel had soared 500% by 2014, according to industry trade figures.

Output: A proposal to accelerate the production of biofuels for use in passenger planes has been criticised by environmental campaigners, who claim that the crop requirements of such fuels could necessitate clearing most of the world’s rainforests. The aviation industry has pledged to achieve carbon neutral growth by 2020. The new plan would increase use of aviation biofuels to 5 million tonnes annually by 2025, and 285 million tonnes by 2050. Almost 100 environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and T&E, are protesting the proposal. A petition opposing the proposal has also received 181,000 signatures.


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Less than one in five alternative assets employees are female
 Preqin’s latest overview of women in alternative assets finds that just under one in five employees at fund management firms is female. This rate varies widely by role, and consistently declines according to seniority.

The highest proportion of women is seen among junior employees, where they constitute 29 per cent of the workforce. However, in each asset class the representation of women falls according to seniority, and overall senior alternative assets staff consist of 11 per cent women. In the same way, women are best represented in investor relations/marketing teams, as high as 53 per cent at venture capital firms. The rate of women in investment teams is much smaller, as low as 10 per cent at hedge funds. The board of directors for an average alternative assets fund, meanwhile, only comprises 5 per cent female members.

According to Preqin’s research, women constitute an industry-wide average of 18.8 per cent of alternative assets fund management staff. This varies by asset class, from 17.9 per cent among private equity firms to 20.6 per cent at venture capital firms.

Across all asset classes, the proportion of female employees falls according to seniority. Women make up 29 per cent of junior alternative assets staff, but 23 per cent of mid-level staff and 11 per cent of senior staff.

By role type, the highest proportions of women are all in investor relations/marketing teams. Fifty-three percent of IR staff at venture capital firms and 50 per cent at private equity firms are women, with representation in other asset classes in the forties. By contrast, in almost all asset classes investment teams have the smallest proportion of women. Representation ranges from 18 per cent at natural resources firms to 10 per cent at hedge funds.

Among senior staff, the average proportion of female employees does not rise above the 11 per cent seen at venture capital firms. Private equity has the lowest rate of senior women, at 9 per cent. This is mirrored in the proportion of women sitting on the boards of directors at alternative assets firms. Across the industry, 5 per cent of firm directors are women.

Amy Bensted (pictured), Head of Hedge Fund Products at Preqin, says: “The low representation of women at alternative assets firms is an issue that has seen increasing attention over recent years. Traditionally a male-dominated industry, the proportion of female employees across the industry is significantly less than 50 per cent, with only investor relations teams in some asset class approaching or surpassing a rate of equal representation. It is notable that women are best represented in client-facing or finance roles, while the deal making and operations teams are the most male-dominated. Beyond this, what is most striking is that even where women are well-represented among junior staff, this is not translating to more women in senior roles. ”

“The disparity in the rates of junior and senior female staff shows that progression through the industry remains rarer for women than for men. This contrasts sharply with institutional investors; women constitute one in five senior staff at public pensions, and more than one in three at foundations. The industry has some way to go before achieving true parity between genders, and this issue will continue to be closely monitored by commentators and industry bodies over the coming years.”

Output: Just 19% of employees at fund management firms are female, according to research by data analysts, Prequin. Women constitute 29% of junior employees, but just 11% of senior alternative assets staff. The highest levels of women, sometimes up to 53%, are found in investor relations and marketing teams. Investment teams have the smallest number of women, ranging from 18% at natural resources firms to 10% at hedge funds. Women also comprise on average just 5% of board members at alternative assets funds. At just 9%, private equity has the lowest rate of women in senior positions.


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Salesforce launches Lead Analytics for Facebook
 Salesforce is rolling out a new Marketing Cloud integration with Facebook that aims to help businesses take advantage of Facebook's B2B digital advertising channel.

It's called Salesforce Lead Analytics for Facebook, and as the name suggests, it lets marketers measure the effectiveness of targeted ad campaigns. The system can pull engagement stats from Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network and create performance visualizations against key marketing automation metrics.

Previously, marketers have only been able to capture customer information from Facebook ads up until the form fill, Salesforce said.

"The Facebook lead ads API helps businesses grow by allowing them to form more meaningful relationships with business decision-makers," said Louis Moynihan, MarTech Partnerships Lead at Facebook.

"A solution like Salesforce Lead Analytics for Facebook is a great tool that leverages the power of our API to help B2B marketers better understand how their campaigns drive leads, opportunities and ultimately business outcomes."

Salesforce said the integration is available today for new and existing Salesforce Pardot and Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio Enterprise Edition customers.

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Output: Salesforce has integrated its Marketing Cloud platform with Facebook, letting clients use the social media giant’s B2B digital ad channel. The system offers engagement stats from the Facebook and Instagram, and can provide performance visualisations for marketing automation metrics. The integration is available immediately for all Salesforce Pardot and Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio Enterprise Edition users.


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Former-PM David Cameron joins electronic payments firm First Data
 David Cameron has taken a job with the electronic payments firm First Data Corporation, his first major private sector job since leaving office.

The former prime minister will work two or three days a month for the US company, which handles credit and debit card transactions and cash machines around the world. The company made revenues of $11.6bn last year, processing 2,800 transfers a second across more than 6m merchant locations.

In a press release, First Data described Cameron as one of the “most prominent global influencers of the early 21st century” and said he would help “expand the company’s footprint in new and existing markets”.

Cameron said: “I am incredibly proud that during my time as prime minister the United Kingdom became a global force in fin-tech [financial technology]. I remain passionate about the opportunities that exist for British and international companies that are developing exciting technologies both for businesses and consumers – technologies that have the potential to revolutionise the way we all live our lives.”

His job was signed off by the advisory committee on business appointments (Acoba), which makes recommendations on new positions for ministers after they leave office.

Because he stepped down as an MP in September last year, Cameron will not have to declare how much he is paid.

Cameron is understood to have signed a deal worth a reported £800,000 for his memoirs, which are due to be published next year. The deal was substantially less than the £4.6m advance received by Tony Blair for his memoirs after leaving office.

Since leaving Downing Street, Cameron’s wife, Samantha, has set up a clothing design company, Cefinn.

Cameron will sit on First Data’s advisory board, helping the chief executive and other senior figures with “international, contextual and geopolitical advice and analysis”.

The former prime minister will also speak “at private and public events for and on behalf of First Data.”

According to the Acoba advice, he must not lobby the government on behalf of First Data for two years from July 2016, when he stepped down as prime minister.

In a letter to Cameron, Acoba notes: “You stated the role is not likely to include contact with government, you have no commercially sensitive information about First Data or its competitors and you did not have previous official dealings with First Data.”

Given Cameron’s former position, Acoba asked the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, John Manzoni, about the role. Manzoni confirmed that the government had no links with First Data, which is based in Atlanta, Georgia.

First Data was taken over by the private equity firm KKR in 2007, one of the biggest private equity deals undertaken. The company was hit hard by the financial crisis but has since bounced back under the chief executive, Frank Bisignano, and was taken public again in 2015.

In 2015 First Data supported the UK launch of Apple Pay, which allows consumers to “tap and pay” with their mobile phones. Last year First Data processed more than 79bn electronic transactions worth a total of $2.2tn.

KKR was co-founded by the influential businessman Henry Kravis, who has an estimated worth of $4.2bn, according to Forbes magazine. Kravis, who was rumoured to be the inspiration for the Gordon Gecko character in Wall Street, remains on the board of First Data. Kravis and Cameron have attended some of the same major financial conferences, including Davos in 2011 and the Bilderburg meeting in 2013.

Since stepping down from parliament, Cameron has become a member of the global board of advisers for the Council on Foreign Relations and taken on various speaking roles.

The former chancellor George Osborne has taken on a wider range of jobs, including becoming the editor of the Evening Standard and an adviser to BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager. Osborne is paid £650,000 a year by BlackRock for one day’s work a week.

Output: Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron has been hired by electronic payments company First Data Corporation to advise its board and speak on its behalf at public and private events. In his first significant private-sector role since ending his political career last year, Cameron will work two-to-three days per month providing insight on international, contextual and geopolitical issues. First Data, which posted $11.6bn in revenue last year, enables credit and debit transactions and manages ATMs globally.


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Jupiter bucks passive investment trend, taking in more money
 J upiter Fund Management showed on Wednesday it is defying the fashion for cheap index-tracking funds, winning clients thanks to its skill as a stock picker.

It took in another £1.2 billion of client money in the past quarter, taking total assets under management to a record £48.4 billion, and suggesting there is still life in active fund management.

Jupiter chief executive Maarten Slendebroek describes the company as a “high conviction active asset manager”.

Its charges are higher than some rivals, but customers reap the benefit in better returns, he insists, resisting the trend for lower fees.

A note from broker Cenkos, titled Not Reading the Script, said: “Revenue margins are declining… costs are rising and active management is dead.

“Or so it is said in some quarters, and Jupiter was meant to be the eye of the perfect storm according to some commentators.”

Cenkos analyst Rae Maile added: “There is no sign that manage-ment is paying attention to the siren voices of doom. We expect that consensus for this year and next will edge higher, again.”

Not all stock pickers can claim to be doing so well. Yesterday it emerged that Jupiter has pulled more than £300 million from the flagship income fund run by Neil Woodford (pictured) in alarm at its poor performance.

Woodford has seen several of his top share picks — notably Provident Financial — suffer this year. He has also lost money on AstraZeneca and Allied Minds, leading him apologising to investors.

Jupiter shares were today up 4.5p at 558p.

Output: Despite investors flocking to passively managed fund products, Jupiter Fund Management has managed to attract fresh fund flows via its actively managed suite of products. The firm pulled in £1.2bn ($1.6bn) during Q3 2017, taking its assets under management to £48.4bn, a new record high for the firm. Jupiter charges higher fees than some of its competitors, noted CEO Maarten Slendebroek, but is also currently delivering outperformance.


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Munich Re and INSHUR enter into auto insurance partnership
 INSHUR (www.inshur.com) today announced a strategic partnership with Munich Re’s Digital Partners to design and distribute innovative commercial auto insurance products through INSHUR’s mobile technology platform.

INSHUR opened for business in 2016 focusing on New York City’s rideshare market; an insurance sector expected to be soon worth more than $1bn. INSHUR is the industry’s only mobile-first, digital platform for commercial auto insurance focused on rideshare drivers. The NYC startup, founded by Dan Bratshpis and David Daiches, has been quietly building a following among drivers.

Traditionally, purchasing insurance coverage could take days, as a driver had to visit a brokers office, sign, and file paperwork and often make repeat visits. INSHUR’s mobile platform automates the whole process; now it can take as little as 171 seconds to get a quote on INSHUR.

Since its launch, INSHUR has underwritten $5M in gross written premiums, converting 26% of drivers quoted into customers. The insurtech startup has focused on organic growth and is now looking beyond New York’s quickly expanding passenger transportation insurance market. Having been privately funded up to this point, the digital insurance platform is setting its sights further afield.

Speaking about INSHUR’s story, Dan Bratshpis, said: “INSHUR responds to a growing demand from a new type of insurance customer. Drivers in the rideshare landscape are already mobile-first operators. When it comes to obtaining commercial auto insurance, this new generation is seeking a digitized insurance experience that aligns with how they do business. We’ve developed a mobile platform which helps solve these existing problems, by digitizing insurance, we can become more customer-centric and responsive to this new type of buyer.”

Andrew Rear, CEO of Digital Partners, said, “We are delighted to be able to support INSHUR’s ride-sharing proposition. We’ve been impressed by the energy and expertise in the INSHUR team and look forward to a successful launch.”

Dan Bratshpis added: “Having a global forward thinking organization backing us, provides tremendous advantages and allows us to scale our digital platform much quicker. We are looking forward to expanding our offering to new geographic territories and broader industry sectors.”

About INSHUR

INSHUR is the only mobile-first provider of commercial auto insurance for TLC drivers.

The mobile app allows TLC drivers to quote, purchase and service their insurance policies at their convenience. The FREE app is available for Android and iOS devices. Founded in October 2016, the management and technical team are based in offices in New York and London. INSHUR provides customers with the ability to get on-demand quotes and cover in minutes and not days. INSHUR means no more calling around for brokers, waiting for a quote, finding parking, mailing checks and coming back with missing paperwork. Owner-operator drivers in NYC that work for black car bases like Uber, Lyft, Gett and car service/taxi bases will find many benefits.

Twitter: @inshur_NYC

For more information, please contact:

Partnerships: growth@inshur.com

Output: Munich Re will begin to offer commercial auto insurance policies through a partnership with New York-based rideshare insurance company INSHUR. INSHUR uses its mobile platform to allow ridesharing drivers to access quotes on-demand, rather than by visiting brokers' offices and filing lengthy paperwork. The firm launched in 2016 and has so far written $5m in premiums. “Having a global forward thinking organization backing us, provides tremendous advantages and allows us to scale our digital platform much quicker", said INSHUR co-founder Dan Bratshpis.


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Indian state seeks $1.5bn to fund IoT development
 HYDERABAD: The Telangana government on Tuesday announced two new policies focussing on Internet of things and e-waste , which are part of the 10 major focus areas of the state's IT policy launched last year.The IoT policy is designed to attract Rs 10,000 crore worth of investments and the creation of five clusters each in three districts.The government aims to provide employment for 50,000 people in five years. Also, the state's e-waste policy calls for earmarking industrial space or sheds for dismantling and recycling e-waste in existing and upcoming industrial parks, estates and industrial clusters.Industries minister KT Rama Rao said: “We aim to develop world-class infrastructure to promote the development of IoT products and IoT-based solutions. Hence, we will create five zones each in Hyderabad, Warangal and Sricilla districts for deployment of points of contact (PoCs) in the IoT space“.The IoT policy is focussed on developing smart city solutions, medicalhealth IoT, smart logistics and agri-tech.These will be propelled by TWorks, a hardware prototyping centre being developed by the state government. The centre will partner with corporates and laboratories to access testing tools and other prototyping equipment specific to IoT.“We plan to promote manufacturing and procurement of IoT-based solutions through government procurement of products and services and having a customs facilitation centre to reduce the time to importexport parts for IoT-based solutions,“ said Rao.He said the government would promote management of ewaste through collaborations with bulk consumers of electronic products, major industry organisations and other stakeholders.The government would also provide incentives to boost refurbishing and recycling centres. A subsidy of Rs 1 crore will be provided for a minimum investment of Rs 5 crore for the first five recyclers and refurbishers. Apart from that, it also plans to give 25% subsidy on lease rentals for every company for the first three years of operation and provide Rs 1,000 as training subsidy per person every month for 1,000 people.

Output: An Indian state is aiming to encourage the development of smart device technologies by investing in the internet of things (IoT). The government of Telangana is aiming to attract $1.5bn of business investment and create 50,000 jobs with the creation of new business clusters in three districts that will develop IoT technology applications. The focus will be on developing smart cities, medical health technologies, agri-tech and logistics. The state is also promoting a number of recycling initiatives, with subsidies announced for investment in waste recycling in the region.


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Millions of plastic pellets enter UK seas from sewage plants
 Sewage plants are contributing to plastic pollution in the oceans with millions of tiny beads spilling into the seas around the UK, according to a new report.

Dozens of UK wastewater treatment plants use tiny plastic pellets, known as Bio-Beads, to filter chemical and organic contaminants from sewage, according to a study from the Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition (CPPC).

The report found that many millions of these pellets, which are only about 3.5mm wide, have been spilled and ended up in the environment.

The author of the report, Claire Wallerstein, said once the Bio-Beads had been released they are hard to spot and almost impossible to remove – yet can cause significant harm to marine wildlife.

“We are learning more all the time about the environmental impact of consumer microplastics in wastewater such as laundry fibres, cosmetic microbeads and tyre dust,” said Wallerstein.

“However, it now seems that microplastics used in the wastewater plants’ own processes could also be contributing to the problem.”

However, South West Water said there was “no evidence that Bio-Beads are currently being released into the marine environment” from any of its sites. It said only nine of its 655 plants use Bio-Beads but did accept there had been spills in the past that “were subsequently cleaned up”.

A spokesperson added: “We worked with the authors to encourage evidence-based rigour to this well-intentioned report. However, in parts, it remains anecdotal rather than factual, some of its conclusions are not supported by evidence and it insufficiently differentiates between nurdles [tiny pellets that form the basis of most plastic products] and Bio-Beads.”

However, Wallerstein said samples had been analysed by a plastics expert who had been studying nurdles for 20 years and he had confirmed they were Bio-Beads.

The Bio-Bead system is used in at least 55 wastewater treatment plants around the UK, according to CPPC.

Wallerstein said the scale of the subsequent pollution could be far-reaching adding that in Cornwall Bio-Beads account for the majority of industrial plastic pellets found littering the beaches.

“We know that these Bio-Beads have now reached the coast of northern Europe as well as the beaches here in the UK. What we need is more research into the scale of this problem and for a concerted effort by water companies to do something about it.”

Industrial pellets and small bits of plastic such as Bio-Beads are mistaken for food by birds, fish, and other marine animals. These particles can kill animals, not only by causing digestive blockages, but also as a result of the high concentrations of pollutants, such as DDT and PCBs, which adhere to them in seawater.

Plastic pollution can also enter the food chain. Last August, the results of a study by Plymouth University reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish.

Wallerstein said: “We understand that Bio-Bead plants have been good at improving the quality of the effluent discharged by our wastewater plants – but this should not involve the risk of polluting our seas and waterways with microplastics, which could have long-term and far-reaching consequences.”

Bio-Beads are used in the last step of the sewage cleaning process before treated effluent water is released back into rivers or straight into the sea. There is currently no mechanism in place to trap lost Bio-Beads in the event of a spill and the CPPC report details several spills and near misses in recent years.

Wallerstein said: “We believe that the Bio-Bead system is far too vulnerable to losses. We are calling for a range of safeguards to be put in place at all plants using it, and ultimately for water companies to phase out its use altogether.”

South West Water said it welcomed the report but called for more research.

“We commend the report’s authors in raising this subject but they insufficiently acknowledge other potential sources of small plastic pellets on south-west beaches such as plastic manufacturing plants in the UK and abroad, or spills from container ships, all of which are worthy of further investigation.”

Output: Sewage plants are releasing millions of tiny plastic beads into seas around the UK, according to a study by environmental group the Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition (CPPC).  At least 55 wastewater treatment plants in the country use pellets known as Bio-Beads, which are just 3.5mm wide, to remove chemical and organic contaminants from sewage. The Bio-Beads, which pose a risk to marine life and can enter the food chain, are hard to see and almost impossible to remove from the oceans once released. South West Water said there was no evidence that its sites were releasing Bio-Beads.


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CoinShares adds ethereum ETN for trading on Nasdaq Stockholm
 Source: CoinShares

Investors seeking exposure to the price movement of ether, the native token of the Ethereum platform, just got a new, but familiar option: two Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) which track the price of Ether - Ether Tracker One (COINETH:SS) and Ether Tracker Euro (COINETHE:SS).

XBT Provider by CoinShares, the issuer behind the world’s first bitcoin ETNs, is announcing that the first Ether ETNs are now available for trading on Nasdaq Stockholm.

“The listing of these two Ether ETNs is a major win for European investors who have been requesting these products for over a year now. As of today, if investors want hassle-free exposure to the price movements of ether, they simply call their broker or trade on their normal brokerage platform - that’s truly remarkable. We are thrilled to be able to deliver on investor demand via a safe, familiar route in Nasdaq,” says Laurent Kssis MD of XBT Provider by CoinShares.

The two ETNs, COINETH and COINETHE are denominated in SEK and EUR respectively. In similar fashion to the group’s bitcoin ETNs, the ether ETNs are structured to track the price of ether, as determined by an index rate comprising the average of the 3 most liquid of a select group of exchanges, daily. The ETNs are traded during normal market hours on Nasdaq Stockholm.

“We are happy to be able to provide investors with this new investment opportunity. Given the high interest we have experienced for the previous listings from XBT Provider it is exciting to now expand the offering into this unique exchange traded certificate. While it is important to acknowledge that exposure to an asset in its early stage of development, such as a digital currency, comes with a risk, trading Ether on Nasdaq Stockholm provides investors with the protection provided by a regulated infrastructure, well-known marketplace and accessibility through their ordinary brokers,” says Helena Wedin, head of ETP Services Europe at Nasdaq.

This is the second major crypto-asset ETN Nasdaq has listed for the CoinShares group, noteworthy as this listing makes Nasdaq Stockholm the only European exchange to offer investors exposure to two of the leading crypto-assets (bitcoin and ether) in a familiar structure.

“Today is a historical moment for Ethereum and ether as an asset; and for the future of crypto-assets. It was a little over two years ago that the bitcoin ETNs began trading - offering investors exposure to bitcoin via an established exchange for the first time. Today, we are able to bring ether to the market and mark another major first. It is important to remember how far and how fast the space has matured in the less than 8 years since this revolution began,” says Ryan Radloff, Co-Principal at CoinShares.

CoinShares, which has been called the ‘iShares® equivalent for Crypto-finance,’ now represents six professional grade crypto-investment vehicles, all of which are pioneering products in their category. With the addition of ether to the platform, CoinShares represents the most diverse investment product line-up available in professional crypto-finance; and notably, the only way for European investors to add ether to their portfolio via an established exchange.

“We’ve stated before that as a group, CoinShares is committed to delivering world-class research and professional-grade access to crypto-assets. Today marks a critical step in delivering on that mission. This launch is the result of a tremendous amount of hard-work from the CoinShares team, key partners and our counterparts at Nasdaq. We could not be more proud to bring this latest set of pioneering product to the market,” says Daniel Masters, Co-Principal at CoinShares.

Output: Just over two years after trading began on bitcoin exchange traded notes (ETNs), Swedish firm CoinShares has launched two ETNs tracking the price of ether. COINETH and COINETHE trade on the Nasdaq Stockholm, and are denominated in SEK and EUR respectively, while their index rate would be based on the daily average from the three most liquid of a select group of exchanges. CoinShares MD Laurent Kssis said the move was a "major win for European investors".


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Ripio raises $31m for ethereum micro-lending
 Latin American micro-lending startup Ripio Credit Network concluded its initial coin offering (ICO) presale, raising $31 million from accredited investors. Following the public Ripio ICO, the startup hopes to have raised a total of about $40 million.

Ripio (formerly BitPagos) has been operating within the crypto space since 2013 and established a blockchain-based lending service to help unbanked Latin American residents obtain loans. Now, the startup aims to expand the service into developing markets outside of Latin America through the creation of the Ripio Credit Network (RCN), an Ethereum-based micro-lending platform.

Using cosigned smart contracts, the network connects borrowers, lenders and co-signing agents. Significantly, both lenders and borrowers can interact with the platform using fiat currency, while the cosigner and corresponding wallet providers settle the contract using RCN tokens. This makes the platform much more accessible to people who are not familiar with cryptocurrency. The settlement process will require fees, but Ripio says they will be far lower than those charged by conventional lenders.

The presale, which was limited to accredited investors, raised $31 million from investors across the world, including significant contributions from Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. Notable investors included Blacktower Capital, Blockchain Investors Consortium, and FBG Capital. Ripio notes that presale participants did not receive a discount, although they did have an opportunity to purchase tokens in much larger quantities than are available in the public Ripio ICO.

“Our goal is to widen financial inclusion by extending credit lending globally, and for implementing it we need worldwide support,” said Ripio founder Sebastian Serrano. “With vast experience on the blockchain market and a willingness to provide developing countries with fair lending conditions, our team is certain that this product will be welcomed by the community and help us democratize the digital economy in developing countries, offering digital payment alternatives within everyone’s reach in these regions where up to 65% of the population remains unbanked.”

The public Ripio ICO is scheduled to begin on October 24 and has a hard cap of 21,250 ETH, worth about $6.4 million at current exchange rates. Based on the success of the presale, it is likely the public distribution event will reach this cap, bringing the Ripio ICO’s fundraising total to about $37 million.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

Output: Argentinian blockchain start-up Ripio has raised $31m in pre-sale funding from private investors, including Steve Nerayoff and Blocktower Capital. The company, formerly known as BitPagos, will now focus on its initial coin offering, due to begin on 24 October, to fund its ethereum-based Ripio Credit Network (RCN). The micro-lending platform aims to bring together borrowers and lenders, using fiat currency and its own RCN token. The platform's goal is to bring financial services to developing countries, where 65% of the population are unbanked, said CEO Sebastian Serrano.


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Coffee shops criticised over UK disposable cup waste
 Coffee shops are not doing enough to deal with the billions of disposable cups that are thrown away in the UK each year, an influential committee of MPs has been told.

The environment audit committee heard that the phenomenal growth of on-the-go coffee meant that 2.5bn disposable cups are thrown away annually in the UK, a number expected to rise to about 3bn by 2025. Only 1% are recycled.

The committee’s chair, Mary Creagh, said this “massive increase” was having a damaging environmental impact and insisted it was time the big coffee chains did more to address the waste they produce.

“These coffee shops have a big responsibility under the the producer responsibility obligations to provide proper recycling facilities and they are in breach of them.”

The runaway popularity of coffee shops shows no sign of slowing down. There are currently about 20,000 outlets in the UK and the committee heard that figure is likely to increase to 30,000 by 2025. This would result in millions more coffee cups being thrown away each day.

Although the majority of people believe that any disposable cups put into a recycling bin will be broken down and the material reused, the committee heard that is not the case. The plastic lining in cups means they cannot be recycled in normal depots and have to be put in special bins and sent to one of three dedicated recycling mills.

The Green party MP Caroline Lucas said the key was to encourage the use of reusable cups.

“It seems to be that [reusable cups] are the best solution if we can get to that and I know some coffee shops offer an incentive if people bring a reusable cup but uptake stands at only 2%.”

The committee raised the possibility of banning the current disposable cups to encourage more easily recyclable alternatives or charging more to use them. These suggestions were opposed by a representative from Costa Coffee and the packaging industry who insisted they were working towards creating a system that would allow consumers to recycle the existing cups.

The committee also heard from Martin Myerscough, the founder of Frugalpac, which claims to make fully recyclable coffee cups.

“We decided it was the cup that was the problem not the recycling system,” said Myerscough. “So we have designed our cup so it can go in any bin and be recycled in any mill.”

He said the company was just completing its first high-speed machine that would make fully recyclable cups at the same speed and for the same price as the existing ones.

“It’s a completely scaleable solution. The cups are the same price, they look the same and they taste the same,” he told the committee.

Output: Coffee shops are failing to respond adequately to the problem of disposable cup waste, according to the UK parliament's environmental audit committee. Each year, 2.5 billion cups are discarded in the UK, with this number expected to increase to 3 billion by 2025. The plastic lining of the cups, of which just 1% are recycled, means that they must be processed in specialised mills. The committee considered the option of banning disposable cups, a move opposed by Costa Coffee and the packaging industry. Martin Myerscough of Frugalpac told the committee that his company produced fully recyclable cups.


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Researchers make sodium-based battery that may challenge lithium
 As a warming world moves from fossil fuels toward renewable solar and wind energy, industrial forecasts predict an insatiable need for battery farms to store power and provide electricity when the sky is dark and the air is still. Against that backdrop, Stanford researchers have developed a sodium-based battery that can store the same amount of energy as a state-of-the-art lithium ion, at substantially lower cost.

Stanford researchers are developing a sodium ion battery based on a compound related to table salt. (Image credit: Getty Images)

Chemical engineer Zhenan Bao and her faculty collaborators, materials scientists Yi Cui and William Chueh, aren’t the first researchers to design a sodium ion battery. But they believe the approach they describe in an Oct. 9 Nature Energy paper has the price and performance characteristics to create a sodium ion battery costing less than 80 percent of a lithium ion battery with the same storage capacity.

“Nothing may ever surpass lithium in performance,” Bao said. “But lithium is so rare and costly that we need to develop high-performance but low-cost batteries based on abundant elements like sodium.”

With materials constituting about one-quarter of a battery’s price, the cost of lithium – about $15,000 a ton to mine and refine – looms large. That’s why the Stanford team is basing its battery on widely available sodium-based electrode material that costs just $150 a ton.

This sodium-based electrode has a chemical makeup common to all salts: It has a positively charged ion – sodium – joined to a negatively charged ion. In table salt, chloride is the positive partner, but in the Stanford battery a sodium ion binds to a compound known as myo-inositol. Unlike the chloride in table salt, myo-inositol is not a household word. But it is a household product, found in baby formula and derived from rice bran or from a liquid byproduct of the process used to mill corn. Crucial to the idea of lowering the cost of battery materials, myo-inositol is an abundant organic compound familiar to industry.

Making it work

The sodium salt makes up the cathode, which is the pole of the battery that stores electrons. The battery’s internal chemistry shuttles those electrons toward the anode, which in this case is made up of phosphorous. The more efficiently the cathode shuttles those electrons toward and backward versus the anode, the better the battery works. For this prototype, postdoctoral scholar Min Ah Lee and the Stanford team improved how sodium and myo-inositol enable that electron flow, significantly boosting the performance of this sodium ion battery over previous attempts. The researchers focused mainly on the favorable cost-performance comparisons between their sodium ion battery and state of the art lithium. In the future they’ll have to look at volumetric energy density – how big must a sodium ion battery be to store the same energy as a lithium ion system.

In addition, the team optimized their battery’s charge-recharge cycle – how efficiently the battery stores electricity coming in from a rooftop solar array, for instance, and how effectively it delivers such stored power to, say, run the house lights at night. To better understand the atomic-level forces at play during this process, postdoctoral scholar Jihyun Hong and graduate student Kipil Lim worked with Chueh and Michael Toney, a scientist with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. They studied precisely how the sodium ions attach and detach from the cathode, an insight that helped improve their overall battery design and performance.

The Stanford researchers believe their Nature Energy paper demonstrates that sodium-based batteries can be cost-effective alternatives to lithium-based batteries. Having already optimized the cathode and charging cycle, the researchers plan to focus next on tweaking the anode of their sodium ion battery.

“This is already a good design, but we are confident that it can be improved by further optimizing the phosphorus anode,” said Cui.

Other members of the team included Stanford researchers Jeffrey Lopez, Yongming Sun and Dawei Feng. The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Battery Materials Research (BMR) Program. X-ray measurements were carried out at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), a national user facility operated by Stanford University on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Output: A sodium-based battery capable of storing the same amount of energy as present lithium-ion batteries but costing less than 80% of a lithium-ion battery has been developed by researchers at Stanford. Due to a lack of material abundance, lithium-ion batteries cost a significant amount of money to produce, with lithium costing roughly $15,000 a tonne to mine and refine. The researchers are basing their battery on a sodium-based electrode, which is $150 a tonne. With a sodium cathode, and phosphorous anode, the Stanford team improved how sodium and myo-inositol enable that electron flow between the two electrodes, significantly improving the efficiency of the battery.


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UK has made no progress in gender equality over past decade: EU
 Britain has made zero progress in tackling inequality between the sexes in the past decade and lags behind Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and France in the EU’s latest gender equality league table.

The UK joins Slovakia and the Czech Republic among the EU’s 28 member states in having made no significant advances in reducing levels of inequality when taking into account a range of fields including the workplace, income, education, health or political engagement.

Britain’s performance declined in the field of educational attainment between 2005 and 2015, according to the Gender Equality Index, although the country remains one the EU’s three best performers in that area.

The UK results fit into a picture of slow progress towards gender equality across Europe between 2005 and 2015. The overall score for gender equality, when a matrix of data is taken into account, rose by just four points, to 66.2 out of 100, with 100 signifying complete gender equality.

The gender gap in employment in the EU is “wide and persistent”, the index report says, with the full-time equivalent (FTE) employment rate of 40% for women and 56% for men. Income gaps have narrowed, but on average women still earn 20% less than men, and the average masks huge disparities across the EU.

Only every third man in the EU engages daily in cooking and housework, compared with nearly eight in 10 women. Almost every second working woman spends an hour or more caring and educating children or grandchildren, elderly or disabled people during the day, compared with only about a third of working men.

The report says: “As the life course of women often involves economic inactivity, part-time work, unpaid work, lower wages and an average of five years’ shorter working life than men, they face a significant risk of poverty in old age. In the EU, 18% of women and 12% of men aged 75-plus are at risk of monetary poverty.”

In education, men still dominate the fields of science and technology (66%). Women represent about three-quarters of tertiary students in education (78%), health and welfare (71%), and humanities and the arts (65%).

The report says: “Segregation in educational choices leads to further gender divisions in the labour market and reinforces the undervaluation of work, skills and competencies traditionally attributed to women.”

It says gender equality in decision-making in political, economic and social areas is “progressing at the fastest rate, but continues to have the lowest score of all domains”.

The advances are sharpest in the corporate setting, where the proportion of women on the boards of the largest listed companies in the EU has more than doubled, from 10% in 2005 to 22% in 2015. However, women account for only 7% of board chairs and presidents and 6% of chief executives in the largest companies.

Vĕra Jourová, the commissioner in Brussels responsible for gender equality, described the results as “embarrassing” and vowed to publish an EU-wide action plan by November.

Vĕra Jourová described the results as ‘embarrassing’. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

She said: “The numbers we see today tell a sad story. A story of stagnation, slow progress and prevailing gender inequality across Europe. We cannot think of our societies as modern when we let so many people down, every year and every day.

“This backwards or stagnating trend I find truly embarrassing. Equality is not about women becoming like men, but tapping the full potential of our society by creating an environment of choice.

“Women are discriminated against when it comes to their career paths and access to jobs. Men are discriminated against their private lives and put under huge pressure to focus on their career and making money.”

The top-scoring country in the EU is Sweden (82.6), followed by Denmark. Greece holds the lowest score (50). Hungary is the second-worst performer. The most improved country is Italy, up 12.9 points in the past 10 years to reach 14th out of 28.

Åsa Regnér, the minister for gender equality in Sweden, said the results in general were depressing.

She said: “Gender equality doesn’t happen automatically. It happens because of leadership, political decisions, because of the allocation of resource or not. It is because politicians fight in debate or not … This is all about political leadership. There are governments and leaders who don’t want gender equality.”

Joanna Maycock, the secretary general of the European Women’s Lobby, who is from the UK, said “critical action” was needed to deal with the issue, and the European commission’s promise of an action plan was not enough.

She said that among the necessary measures, all national governments should offer free childcare, examine their tax practices, review national budgets for gender disparities and apply legal measures to address the “shocking levels of discrimination” against women returning to work after having a baby.

Output: The UK has made no progress in combating gender inequality over the last decade, according to the latest European Union (EU) league table. The UK performed worse in this area than Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Across Europe, the overall score for gender equality increased by just four points between 2005 and 2015, to a total of 66.2 out of 100. The greatest improvement was seen in the corporate sector, with the proportion of women on the boards of major listed companies in the EU rising from 10% in 2005 to 22% in 2015.


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UK has made no progress in gender equality over past decade: EU
 Achieving equality between women and men makes everyone better off. We have come a long way, but there’s still more to do. Let’s shape an economy where gender equality, social fairness and prosperity go hand in hand. #3StepsForward is how policymakers, business leaders and individuals can unite to build a fairer future. We all have a role to play. Join our #3StepsForward campaign and do your part!

Output: The UK has made no progress in combating gender inequality over the last decade, according to the latest European Union (EU) league table. The UK performed worse in this area than Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Across Europe, the overall score for gender equality increased by just four points between 2005 and 2015, to a total of 66.2 out of 100. The greatest improvement was seen in the corporate sector, with the proportion of women on the boards of major listed companies in the EU rising from 10% in 2005 to 22% in 2015.


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Chance The Rapper partners with Lyft to 'Round Up & Donate'
 In 2017, Chance the Rapper’s altruism has been unmatched. From donating $1 million to Chicago Public Schools to even working the grill at Nando’s for charitable reasons, he hasn’t disappointed. For his latest endeavor, Chance has partnered up with Lyft starting Tuesday (Oct. 10) to help underfunded Chicago Public Schools.

Explore See latest videos, charts and news Chance the Rapper Lifestyle See latest videos, charts and news

For Chicago riders using Lyft, you can round up your fare and donate to Chance’s arts enrichment fund program for kids in struggling CPS. Simply tap ‘Round Up & Donate’ on your Lyft app, which will automatically round up your fare to the nearest dollar and the difference will be donated to New Chance: Arts & Literature Fund.

“Through the New Chance Arts & Literature Fund, I’m committed to giving the kids in Chicago as much as I can,” Chance says. “And now with Lyft’s Round Up & Donate, we can give them much more because the more we ride, the more we raise to bring more arts programs to Chicago Public Schools.”

To join, Chicago residents must tap on the ‘Settings’ tab on the app, select ‘Round Up & Donate,’ choose CPS: The New Chance Fund and take your ride from wherever in the Windy City.

Output: US artist Chance the Rapper has partnered with ride-hailing firm Lyft to launch Round Up & Donate, an initiative aimed at raising money for Chicago's public schools. Lyft users in the city will see a Round Up & Donate button in-app; those who activate the feature will have their fare automatically rounded up to the nearest dollar, with the extra funds donated to the rapper's New Chance: Arts & Literature Fund.


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YouTube tests subtitled auto-play for videos on app homepage
 Android Central

YouTube has begun testing a feature that auto-plays videos that appear on its app’s homepage to get a gauge of what a video is about before watching.

Through the feature, users can choose to watch full videos, however the videos are played with subtitles overlaid and not without sound. If the user scrolls up or down past a video, it stops playing and instead the next video in view plays.

The auto-play homepage feature, which was first spotted by Android Central, is currently only on the Android app. It has been dubbed ‘Play as you browse’ and can be disabled through Account -> Settings -> General -> Play as you browse. In addition, if the user doesn’t want to entirely disable the feature, they can choose to only have it work when they are connected to a wi-fi network.

In August, YouTube parent Google rolled out video previews in mobile search results. Unlike the YouTube’s play as you browse, this feature only plays six-second silent clips to provide the gist of a video.

Join us at the 2017 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony, taking place in London on Thursday 16 November, to mix with the industry's best and brightest, and raise a glass to the year's best campaigns and solutions. To find out more, and to book your place, click here.

Output: Video-sharing site YouTube is testing a new feature on its Android app that enables users to assess auto-play video content they encounter while browsing to decide if they want to watch it. Videos on the app homepage will play automatically with subtitles rather than sound, stopping immediately if a user continues scrolling, with the same process continuing for the next video that comes into view. The move follows Google's August launch of video previews in search results, which offer six-second silent clips of a video.


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Oranj launches software platform to cut down investors' fees
 CHICAGO, Oct. 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Oranj has developed MAX (Manage, Advise, eXperience), the first open-access, end-to-end wealth management software providing financial advisers with direct access to a powerful solution that can help reduce some product and technology fees—helping advisers adopt new technology without increasing their cost of doing business, and in some cases, making investing less expensive for investors.

MAX will combine Oranj's client-facing engagement and account aggregation tools with institutional-grade trading and rebalancing functionalities from TradeWarrior Software, Inc., in which Oranj acquired a majority stake earlier this year. In addition, prominent investment management firms such as BlackRock, Direxion, Morningstar Managed Portfolios, ETF Securities, and Frost Investment Advisors will host model portfolios and funds on MAX, enabling advisers to seamlessly utilize investment solutions within their business on a single software platform. Unlike similar solutions in the marketplace, MAX is custodian-agnostic, and can integrate seamlessly with all major custodians and brokers. In addition, Shareholders Service Group and Liberty Partners Financial Services have agreed to offer MAX to the advisers in their respective networks, which cumulatively reach more than 1,500 advisers across the country.

Many investors are unaware that their investment costs include multiple layers of product and technology fees along with advisers' fees. The direct access to investment managers, and powerful portfolio construction and management tools, on MAX can remove some of these fees, which advisers are often forced to pass on to their clients—reducing both business expenses for advisers and the overall cost of investing for investors. To learn more about MAX, or reserve a spot for access, please visit www.maxadviser.io.

"As a former adviser myself, I know first-hand the value that advisers provide for their clients at every stage of their lives. MAX is a groundbreaking solution that not only reduces the friction associated with connecting and collaborating with an adviser, but can also slash the costs of both doing business as an adviser and investing as an investor," said David Lyon, CEO and Founder of Oranj. "By offering advisers free world-class technology and direct access to best-of-breed investment managers, MAX can eliminate some of the product and technology fees that, in many cases, are factored into the cost of investing with an adviser—giving advisers the power to help more Americans avoid the DIY investing approach which often leads to underperformance and emotion-based decisions."

MAX features will include:

Adviser/Client Portal offering an unlimited number of clients and prospects a user-friendly experience when working with an adviser, and eliminating lengthy meetings and cumbersome delivery of financial statements.

offering an unlimited number of clients and prospects a user-friendly experience when working with an adviser, and eliminating lengthy meetings and cumbersome delivery of financial statements. Account Aggregation tools providing access to accounts at over 25,000 financial institutions— enabling advisers to obtain holistic insight into an investor's overall financial profile, and helping clients understand the financial impact of important life decisions and adapt accordingly.

tools providing access to accounts at over 25,000 financial institutions— enabling advisers to obtain holistic insight into an investor's overall financial profile, and helping clients understand the financial impact of important life decisions and adapt accordingly. Online Account Opening/Transfer capabilities allowing advisers to seamlessly work with clients to complete online account openings and transfers.

capabilities allowing advisers to seamlessly work with clients to complete online account openings and transfers. eSignature Powered by DocuSign , which decreases the time and effort required to execute and deliver documents by allowing advisers and clients to electronically sign documents within MAX.

, which decreases the time and effort required to execute and deliver documents by allowing advisers and clients to electronically sign documents within MAX. Institutional-Grade Trading and Rebalancing software which can streamline the trading and rebalancing of accounts, saving advisers time and costs for both their clients and their business, especially during market corrections.

software which can streamline the trading and rebalancing of accounts, saving advisers time and costs for both their clients and their business, especially during market corrections. Risk Assessment and Alerts from the software, which will monitor and notify advisers when accounts have drifted past their appropriate risk profile.

from the software, which will monitor and notify advisers when accounts have drifted past their appropriate risk profile. FIX (financial information eXchange) Trading connection which allows trades to be sent electronically from MAX to any custodian for execution.

connection which allows trades to be sent electronically from MAX to any custodian for execution. Investment Marketplace complete with asset allocation models, enabling advisers to evaluate a wide variety of strategies and model portfolios from recognized investment managers and move ahead with incorporating these strategies into investor portfolios.

complete with asset allocation models, enabling advisers to evaluate a wide variety of strategies and model portfolios from recognized investment managers and move ahead with incorporating these strategies into investor portfolios. Real-Time Net Worth/Balance Sheet calculations for every client which can be easily accessed by advisers.

calculations for every client which can be easily accessed by advisers. Secure Document Vault which stores important documents and communications going back to the prospect stage, and can be easily accessed by advisers and their clients through the adviser/client portal.

"We are excited to offer Morningstar® Managed PortfoliosSM on Oranj's MAX platform," said Nicholas VanDerSchie, Head of Managed Portfolios at Morningstar Investment Management LLC. "Our managed portfolio services allow advisers to tap into the investment expertise of our global team, freeing up their time to focus on value-added activities like financial planning and behavioral coaching."

About Oranj

Oranj is focused on creating the world's best digital experience for enabling financial advisers to help clients effectively manage their financial lives and personal goals, and empowering investors to make smart financial decisions, connect with financial professionals, and pursue better investing outcomes. To achieve this, Oranj builds software for servicing, collaborating, managing, and connecting, which utilizes user-friendly applications for a fully interactive human-driven, technology-assisted experience. The Oranj platform offers a secure document vault, client collaboration tools, aggregated data from more than 25,000 institutions, online account opening/transfer capabilities, real-time activity notifications, extensive data analytics, and an archive of adviser/client communication going back to the prospect stage. Oranj also offers access to institutional-grade trading and rebalancing solutions from TradeWarrior Software, Inc., in which Oranj acquired a majority stake in April 2017. For more information about Oranj, please visit www.runoranj.com or follow @runoranjdotcom on Twitter.

CONTACT:

Andrew Jennings

JConnelly

(973) 224-7152

ajennings@jconnelly.com

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oranj-seeks-to-modernize-advisers-businesses-by-developing-industrys-first-free-wealth-management-software-300533791.html

SOURCE Oranj

Output: US-based Oranj has launched a software platform for financial advisers aiming to provide additional technology and access to products while not increasing fees which could be passed on to clients. The platform, called MAX, will provide aggregation and rebalancing tools alongside model portfolio options. Firms such as BlackRock, Direxion and Morningstar, among others, will have model portfolios hosted by the platform. The firm says the direct access to these asset managers will serve to cut down some layers of fees investors may encounter.


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Pearson to contest testing contract awarded to rival in Iowa
 Pearson is fighting to halt a decision by the state of Iowa to award a $31 million testing contract to the American Institutes for Research, arguing that the scoring of bids was riddled with “preferential treatment and bias.”

The giant education corporation filed its appeal as a petition to stay the award with the Iowa Department of Administrative Services, arguing that the state failed to follow the parameters of its request for proposals for the work.

Appeals of state testing awards by losing vendors are not uncommon. Assessment companies are known to dispute the scoring processes and rationale of state officials when competing for contracts worth many millions of dollars.

In 2015, Pearson and AIR engaged in a memorable and high-stakes battle over a potentially enormous contract issued for testing work overseen by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, a common-core state testing consortium. Pearson, which had won that contract, ultimately prevailed in that fight, when a district court judge ruled against AIR’s lawsuit.

The Iowa contract was one of three state assessment contracts that the AIR, a nonprofit vendor based in Washington, D.C., had tentatively secured over the past few weeks, worth a combined $84 million. The vendor was also poised to win deals in Indiana and North Dakota. All three awards were not yet final, until other vendors were given the opportunity to challenge the awards.

The Iowa contract called for a vendor to complete work over a period of more than five years. It covered new state assessments in English/language arts, math, and science, Iowa officials have said. The five other vendors who pursued the contract were Pearson; ACT Inc.; Data Recognition Corporation; Questar; and the University of Kansas, according to the state.

Some Iowa legislators had urged the state Department of Education to use an Iowa-based exam instead of one provided by an out-of-state vendor.

In a statement to Marketplace K-12, Pearson spokesman Scott Overland said that Pearson is a “proud employer of hundreds of Iowa residents” and that its bid was “predicated upon using local employees and facilities to develop, administer, and report the assessments.” As a result, when judged by the “overall impact to Iowans,” Pearson offered a better deal, he argued.

The Iowa Department of Education referred questions on the Pearson appeal to the state’s department of administrative services. An official for the administrative services agency said no decision on Pearson’s appeal or stay has been made.

The American Institutes for Research declined to comment on Pearson’s filing, saying that doing so was not appropriate since the Iowa contract had not been finalized.

In its appeal, Pearson asks that Iowa state officials rescind the award to the AIR and re-score the proposals–or that the an entirely new RFP be put forward and bids be judged “openly, impartially, and without bias.”

See also:

Output: UK-based education services company Pearson has appealed against a state decision to award a $31m testing contract to the American Institutes for Research (AIR), alleging "preferential treatment and bias". In papers filed with the Iowa Department of Administrative Services, Pearson called for the proposals to be resubmitted and judged "openly, impartially, and without bias". AIR, which has locked horns with Pearson previously, recently won three contracts worth a combined $84m, but would not comment on Pearson's claim, as the contract had not been finalised.


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Moving toward a pay-for-value model of prescription drug pricing
 Credit: Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

One of the health care issues about which seemingly all Americans agree: Prescription drug prices have skyrocketed. And they keep going higher. How do Americans get better value for their health care dollars?

One answer may be novel pricing models that more closely link a drug's price to its value, rather than paying for volume. Drug manufacturers, however, argue that Medicaid's "best-price rule" inhibits their ability to enter into these new pricing arrangements.

Not so fast, says an expert on drug pricing and regulation at Washington University in St. Louis.

"The best-price rule is not as serious a problem as drug manufacturers might perceive it to be," said Rachel Sachs, associate professor of law and co-author of "Innovative Contracting for Pharmaceuticals and Medicaid's Best-Price Rule," recently published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

The best-price rule essentially states that Medicaid is entitled to the best price for any drug that's paid in the private market. If a drug company wants to give a big discount to a private insurer, Medicaid is entitled to that discount as well.

"The rule does not apply to a wide range of payers—drug manufacturers can enter into innovative contracting models with Medicare Part D or the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs without running afoul of the rule," Sachs said. "It only applies when the discount it would trigger exceeds the statutorily required Medicaid discount, which is already quite large. And manufacturers can structure their contracts with payers ahead of time to minimize its impact."

The rule, argue Sachs and co-authors Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan and Darius N. Lakdawalla of the University of Southern California, should not be an obstacle to pricing innovation alternatives, including indication-based pricing, outcome-based pricing, drug licenses and drug mortgages. Where it is an obstacle, drug manufacturers can often restructure their contracts to avoid or mitigate the rule's impact.

"Pharmaceutical companies and insurers have expressed interest in a number of different innovative pricing models, chief among them outcome-based pricing and indication based pricing," Sachs said. "Many people find an intuitive appeal in the idea behind outcome-based pricing—if a drug doesn't work for a patient, why should they have to pay for it?"

Sachs said she is looking forward to more indication-based pricing deals, where manufacturers charge different prices for the same drug depending on the indication for which it is being prescribed.

"If the indication-based price is tied to how much value that drug provides for the particular indication, shifting to indication-based pricing systems could begin to move our payment system for drugs more in the direction of value, not volume," she said.

"The best-price rule is not as serious a problem as drug manufacturers sometimes make it out to be," Sachs and her colleagues write in the paper. "But it is also not simply a convenient excuse for refusing to try something new. The law here is complex, and fostering the adoption of new pricing models will require close coordination among manufacturers, payers and regulators.

Output: One of the health care issues about which seemingly all Americans agree: Prescription drug prices have skyrocketed. And they keep going higher. How do Americans get better value for their health care dollars?


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Are Prescription Drugs Next On Amazon’s Agenda?
 The investment community was abuzz Tuesday following word that Amazon might be considering a move into the prescription drug business.

Speculation about such a move began surfacing around the time Amazon acquired Whole Foods in June, but analysts at investment firm Leerink fueled the flames on Friday when they commented that Amazon “almost certainly” will get into prescription drugs within a couple of years.

Critics countered that, while it’s hard to rule out Amazon’s will to disrupt another part of the business environment, the online service hasn’t fared as well when dealing with highly regulated industries, including alcohol distribution.

“The highly regulated drug business has never been particularly transparent,” journalist Emma Court wrote in a MarketWatch report on the subject Tuesday. “At best, U.S. drug pricing is complex; at worst, it’s dysfunctional.”

Still, pharmacy benefit management and mail order firms like Express Scripts could become particularly vulnerable if Amazon jumps into the arena. Some speculate that the powerful online retailer, with its robust cash, may even look to enter into the space via acquisition.

Following last Friday’s Leerink report, Express Scripts stock fell 2.5 percent, while the CVS and Walgreens chains fell about 5 percent, according to a CNN Money report, which noted that all three stocks fell further in trading on Monday, even as Amazon and the major stock markets were up.

In midday trading Tuesday, Express Scripts and Walgreens were down again, while CVS stock was up slightly.

In, perhaps, unrelated news, Express Scripts announced Tuesday that it is buying eviCore for $3.6 billion. The Bluffton, SC-based eviCore contracts with health plans and commercial clients to manage health care services.

For its part, Amazon said it had no comment on the speculative market reports.

(Sources: CNN Money; MarketWatch)

Output: The investment community was abuzz Tuesday following word that Amazon might be considering a move into the prescription drug business. Speculation about such a move began surfacing around the time Amazon acquired Whole Foods in June, but analysts at investment firm Leerink fueled the flames on Friday when they commented that Amazon “almost certainly” will get into prescription drugs within a couple of years.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
California doesn't have enough doctors, and this bad law isn't helping
 California doesn’t have enough doctors.

By 2025, the state will be short about 4,700 primary-care physicians, according to a recent report from the UC San Francisco Healthforce Center. This will result in more people turning to costly emergency-room visits for routine care, it predicts.

One solution is to expand the role of well-trained nurse practitioners, who can meet the basic healthcare needs of our growing population at a fraction of the cost of doctor visits. That’s what many other states are doing.

But this obvious remedy is opposed by a powerful interest — doctors. As a result, the Legislature has repeatedly failed to give greater independence to nurse practitioners, or NPs for short.

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I wasn’t even aware of this issue until I stopped by a CVS MinuteClinic the other day to get my annual flu shot (which you should do as well; about 36,000 people in this country are killed by the flu every year).

The clinic’s nurse practitioner and I chatted as she prepped my injection. I asked if she could do most things a doctor could do. Could she prescribe medicine?

Yes, she replied, she could prescribe meds and do pretty much everything a family practitioner can do.

So why aren’t there more clinics like the one at CVS, serving as the affordable front line in our battle for wellness?

“The law doesn’t allow it,” she answered.

Really?

Theresa Ullrich, president of the California Assn. for Nurse Practitioners, clarified that the law does allow for greater use of NPs, but it contains language that makes an expanded role challenging if not impossible.

“We’re a good answer to the need for cost-effective and high-quality care,” she told me. “But we’re hamstrung by the state’s regulatory language.”

First, many people might not know the difference between a nurse and a nurse practitioner. In California, a registered nurse needs at least an associate’s degree in nursing, which takes about two years to obtain, often from a community college.

A nurse practitioner, meanwhile, must have at least a master’s degree and must receive advanced training in his or her specialty, such as family medicine. Unlike a nurse, a nurse practitioner can order tests, diagnose medical problems and manage a patient’s overall care.

Think of an NP falling between a nurse and a doctor. The typical nurse practitioner receives up to eight years of postsecondary education, whereas a doctor receives an average 12 years of postsecondary education and training, often more.

An NP focuses on wellness — keeping patients fit and addressing routine medical needs, such as checkups and health-maintenance programs. More complicated issues would require a doctor’s care.

For years, healthcare advocates have been pushing for a greater emphasis on nurse practitioners, and that makes a lot of sense. Many medical issues don’t require the expertise of a physician.

NPs, who earn about half what the typical California doctor makes, are in a position to offer treatment at a much more reasonable cost.

The problem is a state law requiring all drug-prescribing nurse practitioners to have a “supervising physician,” even though this doctor might play little if any role in the NP’s day-to-day practice.

“If I opened my own clinic, I would need a physician to supervise me,” Ullrich said, “and I’d need to put him on the payroll.”

The law also stipulates that each supervising physician oversee no more than four nurse practitioners.

“So if the clinic was going to expand,” Ullrich said, “I’d have to bring on more supervising physicians, and I’d have to pay them as well.”

The California Medical Assn., which represents doctors, insists that patients benefit from having physicians oversee nurse practitioners — even if a doctor isn’t physically present or isn’t terribly engaged with an NP’s activities.

“Physician-led, team-based care is one of the best avenues to quality, low-cost healthcare,” Joanne Adams, a spokeswoman for the trade group, said in a statement.

She cited the “collaborative relationship between physicians and other healthcare practitioners,” and her organization’s support for “efforts to expand the productivity of these teams.”

That’s a lot of team spirit. But it’s hard not to suspect that doctors are just trying to make sure they keep getting a piece of the action for relatively little work.

Nearly two-dozen states have waived the requirement that nurse practitioners have a supervising physician. More than dozen others allow NPs to diagnose and treat patients (but not prescribe drugs) on their own.

California is the only Western state that still requires a supervising physician for nurse practitioners to diagnose, treat and prescribe medicine for patients.

“I could move to Nevada or Oregon and open my own practice without having to pay a physician to oversee what I’m doing,” Ullrich said.

State Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), an optometrist before he turned to politics, has introduced bills seeking to follow other states in granting NPs more freedom. Each bill has collapsed amid fierce opposition from the doctors lobby.

“Organized medicine — the California Medical Assn. — doesn’t want anyone infringing on their business,” Hernandez told me.

He said there’s no evidence that giving nurse practitioners more latitude to practice medicine endangers the public or undermines the integrity of the healthcare system.

“In fact, there’s decades of evidence showing that they’re safe and that patients like them,” Hernandez said.

He emphasized that for many rural and inner-city communities, NPs may be the only healthcare providers willing to open local clinics and to take Medi-Cal.

While a third of Californians rely on the state-federal insurance program for coverage, a recent study found that 36% of California doctors refuse to see Medi-Cal patients because of relatively low reimbursement rates.

The state has a population close to 40 million people. By 2050, California could have 50 million residents, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Not having enough doctors to meet the healthcare needs of that population is frightening.

Not taking steps to address this shortfall with a greater number of nurse practitioners is simply foolish.

David Lazarus’ column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.

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Output: California doesn’t have enough doctors. By 2025, the state will be short about 4,700 primary-care physicians, according to a recent report from the UC San Francisco Healthforce Center. This will result in more people turning to costly emergency-room visits for routine care, it predicts.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Hepatitis death count hits 18 in San Diego outbreak
 San Diego County Public health nurse Summer Leal puts a Bandaid Terrie Woolever’s upper arm after giving her a hepatitis shot at the City of San Diego’s new tent city at 20th and B streets Monday.

Another death was connected to San Diego’s ongoing hepatitis A outbreak Tuesday even as the number of confirmed cases and hospitalizations showed their smallest increases in weeks.

The county Health and Human Services Agency released its weekly update on the outbreak, bumping the number of deaths from 17 to 18. The number of confirmed cases grew by nine, reaching 490.

The latest death occurred in September and the public health department had been awaiting confirmation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before adding it to the outbreak total.

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Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer, said Tuesday that another death has since been reported, starting the multi-week wait for confirmation that the death was caused by one of the 15 strains detected in San Diego’s outbreak which has now spread to other locations in California as well as Arizona and Utah.

Wooten went before the county Board of Supervisors Tuesday to request that the local public health emergency she declared on Sept. 1 be renewed for another two weeks. She said the county and local health providers have now delivered 68,500 hepatitis A vaccination doses, including 53,869 to those considered at-risk — homeless residents, drug users and those with liver diseases and compromised immune systems.

As of last Saturday, Wooten said 501 “foot team” missions have been conducted, taking the vaccination effort to sidewalks, street corners and riverbeds where many who are at risk sleep and socialize.

Dr. Nick Yphantides, the county’s chief medical officer, took a moment at Tuesday’s meeting to debunk what he said has become belief among some in the public that the outbreak is being caused by tainted water near where homeless are camped.

“There (are) absolutely no established cases that are isolated to be associated with any water sources in the outbreak,” Yphantides said.

The county’s vaccination efforts, which have been bolstered by sanitation improvements from hand washing stations to periodic sidewalk cleaning, are about to enter a new phase.

Dr. Robert Schooley, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said Tuesday that his organization, and other local health providers, are gearing up for a big outreach effort in San Diego’s many single-room-occupancy hotels.

“We’re trying to figure out how best to configure the teams and to interact with the folks who run these facilities so that we’re efficient and not intrusive,” Schooley said.

The San Diego Housing Commission’s current list of single-occupancy hotels in the city includes 101 different properties with 5,068 rooms. Capacity ranges from the seven-room Gibraltar Lodge on Clay Avenue to the 325-room Golden West Hotel on 4th Avenue downtown.

These properties tend to rent one room per individual at prices far below the cost of an apartment. They often have shared bathroom facilities.

It was not clear Tuesday when the additional vaccination efforts might start. County health officials did not respond to requests for more information on the effort or on the overall trend in local case counts.

For the first time in many months, the number of new cases and hospitalizations added to overall totals rose by less than 10. Last week, by comparison, those same counts jumped by more than 20 in a week.

Does this mean that the outbreak is losing steam?

Wooten told the supervisors Tuesday that about 20 new cases per week were reported from May through August but, more recently, the trend has been “two to three per day.”

If the current new-case rate is closer to two per day than three then that would seem to indicate that the outbreak’s spread is slowing a bit. Health department officials did not respond Tuesday to a request for more information.

Schooley, the UC San Diego infectious disease chief, said the outbreak is not currently producing the level of urgency that it did a few months ago.

“It does look as if things are not increasing as rapidly as they were in the spring. Over the last number of weeks things seem to be stabilizing,” Schooley said.

But he cautioned that, especially with a disease that has a five- to 50-day incubation period, it’s too soon to make definitive statements about the outbreak.

“While the trends we’ve seen are very good, it’s too early to say we’re seeing an end,” Schooley said.

UC San Diego hospitals had treated 115 hepatitis A patients, including seven who died, as of Sept. 22.

Wooten told the board that there were still 47 suspected cases under investigation, the same number that a county official cited last week.

Because it takes weeks for the CDC to confirm that each case was caused by the same hepatitis A strains identified in the county’s outbreak, the official number of confirmed cases always lags behind preliminary totals.

Health Playlist × On Now Video: Leaders urge public to help extinguish hepatitis outbreak On Now San Diego starts cleansing sidewalks, streets to combat hepatitis A On Now Video: Scripps to shutter its hospice service On Now Video: Scripps La Jolla hospitals nab top local spot in annual hospital rankings On Now Video: Does a parent's Alzheimer's doom their children? On Now EpiPen recall expands On Now Kids can add years to your life

paul.sisson@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1850

Twitter: @paulsisson

Output: Another death was connected to San Diego’s ongoing hepatitis A outbreak Tuesday even as the number of confirmed cases and hospitalizations showed their smallest increases in weeks. The county Health and Human Services Agency released its weekly update on the outbreak, bumping the number of deaths from 17 to 18. The number of confirmed cases grew by nine, reaching 490.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Andela gets $40m to connect African STEM talent to tech companies
 Andela, a New York-based platform that connects Africa’s engineering talent with global technology companies, secured $40M in Series C funding.

The round was led by pan-African venture firm CRE Venture Capital with participation from DBL Partners, Amplo, Salesforce Ventures, and Africa-focused TLcom Capital and existing investors Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, and Spark Capital.

The round, which brings total venture capital funding to just over $80M, will use the capital to accelerate its expansion plans. In conjunction with the funding, Pule Taukobong of CRE, Julia Gillard, former Australian Prime Minister and Amplo Board Partner, and Omobola Johnson, Senior Partner at TLcom and former Minister of Communication Technology in Nigeria, will be joining Andela’s board.

The company intends to use the funds to launch offices in two additional African countries over the next year, doubling its developer base from 500 to 1,000.

Launched in 2014 by Jeremy Johnson, CEO, Andela supports more than 100 partner companies in building engineering teams by investing in African software developers. Partners include Viacom, Mastercard Labs, Gusto and GitHub, among others. Beyond recruiting elite development talent, the company is catalyzing the growth of tech ecosystems across the continent by open-sourcing its content and partnering with organizations including Google and Pluralsight to provide resources and mentorship to developers.

Andela, which has offices in Lagos, Nigeria, Nairobi, Kenya, and Kampala, Uganda, has hired 500 developers to date.

FinSMEs

10/10/2017

Output: New York-based Andela has raised $40m in a series C funding round led by CRE Venture Capital, and featuring participation from existing investors, including the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. As part of the round, former Australian prime minister and board partner of investor Amplo, Julia Gillard, will join Andela's board. The platform brings together global technology firms and up-and-coming African software developers, and counts Mastercard Labs and GitHub among its partners. The new funds will be used to double Andela's developer base to 1,000 and launch in two additional African countries over the next year.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
MedPAC pushes for MIPS repeal
 Dive Brief:

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) has suggested ending the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), which is one of the payment tracks in MACRA. Nearly all members of MedPAC backed scrapping MIPS at its meeting late last week.

MIPS, which allows providers to earn performance-based payment adjustments to Medicare payments, is too burdensome and won’t improve care, they said.

In place of MIPS, the commission suggested a new program by which a portion of payments (perhaps 2%) is withheld. Providers not in an advanced payment model (APM) could join a group of physicians whose claims data is reviewed on certain population-based health measures to see if they qualify to have the withheld funds returned. Providers who do not participate in an APM or the new model would forfeit the withheld portion.

Dive Insight:

MedPAC members said MIPS doesn't focus enough on patient care, but instead on whether providers order tests and follow clinical guidelines. MedPAC’s suggestions do carry some influence, but it doesn't create policy. It’s a nonpartisan legislative branch agency that offers analysis and policy advice to the Congress.

Payment adjustments from MACRA are set to begin in 2019, and providers are in the process of choosing their track and making sure they are ready to report their quality metrics. Scrapping the program could bring relief to some providers, but it's late in the game for such a major change.

Providers generally have mixed feelings about MIPS. Most want to push toward value-based payment models, but find flaws in MIPS, particularly the heavy reporting requirements. In response, a recent MACRA proposal would exempt more small providers from the program, leaving about 36% of clinicians eligible for participating next year. In comments to this proposed rule, provider groups suggested tweaks like allowing more advanced alternative payment models to quality for MACRA.

A recent Medical Group Management Association survey found group practices feel MIPS is too complex and doesn't benefit patient care. Nearly three-fourths (73%) of those surveyed said MIPS doesn't “support our practice’s clinical quality priorities” and the same percentage called MIPS either “very” or “extremely” complex. MIPS’ complexity may get worse in 2018.

Michael Abrams, managing partner at Numerof & Associates, recently told Healthcare Dive that he's concerned about the greater flexibility in MIPS in 2018. “MACRA in its original form was extremely flexible, maybe even more flexible than it needed to be or than was actually wise,” said Abrams. “If the point is to minimize the burden on physicians, keep it simple.”

In addition to the complexity, a recent Avalere analysis found that Medicare payments to some specialists could rise or fall by as much as 16% for the 2018 performance year if CMS finalizes its plan to change how MIPS adjustments are calculated.

Some in the industry, however, fear rolling back value-based payment initiatives will be a major setback for the overall movement. AMGA, for example, opposed the increased exemptions to MIPS, saying the move "fails to recognize the significant investments made in preparation for participation" in MACRA.

Output: The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) has suggested ending the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), which is one of the payment tracks in MACRA. Nearly all members of MedPAC backed scrapping MIPS at its meeting late last week.