Archive for June 30, 2026

Mental Health Overtakes Prescription Refills as Top Reason Canadians Use Virtual Care, New Data Shows

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 30, 2026 by itnerd

Your Doctors Online (YDO) today released an analysis of patient consultation data covering January 1 through June 9, 2026. Drawn from more than 32,000 active cases, the findings reveal growing demand for mental health support among Canadians, particularly younger adults who are increasingly turning to digital platforms as their primary point of medical contact.

Mental health emerged as the leading consultation category on the YDO platform in the first half of 2026. Anxiety and depression together accounted for more than 5,600 consultations in just over five months — surpassing prescription refills, lab result reviews, and every other category of patient contact combined.

Behind those numbers is a high volume of consultations from young adults between the ages of 18 and 34, and disproportionately women, who are reaching out for care.

Among YDO’s most common consultation reasons in the first half of 2026, anxiety and depression stood out as the dominant drivers of patient demand. Anxiety alone generated 3,350 consultations — 77% involving female patients — while depression accounted for a further 2,274 consultations, with women comprising 82% of that total.

The 18–34 cohort is particularly striking. This age group accounts for 2,455 anxiety consultations and 1,822 depression consultations — dwarfing every other demographic segment. Adults aged 35–54 represent the second-largest group (747 anxiety, 372 depression), while those 55 and over account for a comparatively small fraction of mental health contacts.

The pattern in YDO’s data aligns closely with what front-line clinicians have been observing across Canada’s healthcare system — a sustained demand for mental health support that far outpaces available resources, and a particular concentration of need among younger adults navigating the economic, social, and psychological pressures of post-pandemic life.

YDO’s data arrives against a backdrop of well-documented strain on Canada’s mental health infrastructure. According to national health authorities, wait times for publicly funded mental health services can stretch from several months to over a year in many provinces. For a 24-year-old in the middle of an anxiety crisis, or a 28-year-old who has just run out of antidepressants and cannot get a same-week appointment, virtual care has become a vital safety net.

Top consultation reasons, YDO platform — Jan 1 to Jun 9, 2026:

  • Anxiety — 3,350 cases (77% female; 18–34 age group accounts for 73% of cases)
  • Depression — 2,274 cases (82% female; 18–34 age group accounts for 80% of cases)
  • Lab results review and requisitions — 1,818 cases (61% female)
  • Prescription refills — 1,292 cases (54% female, 46% male — most balanced split across all categories)
  • Patient needs assistance — 410 cases
  • Nutrition consultation — 293 cases (73% female; primarily weight management and metabolic health)

Methodology Note:

All data referenced in this release represents total consultations, not unique individuals, as single patients may have multiple interactions. Data is fully anonymized and aggregated at the population level. No patient names, contact details, or personally identifiable information of any kind are collected, stored, or referenced. YDO’s data practices comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial health information legislation.

Note on Gender Data: Analysts note that the stark gender split reflects help-seeking behavior as much as clinical need. Research consistently shows men are less likely to reach out for mental health support, meaning male numbers within telehealth data likely understate the actual scope of need.

Fortra Recognized by U.S. News as a Best Company to Work For in Four Categories

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 30, 2026 by itnerd

Fortra has been named a 2026 U.S. News Best Company to Work For in four categories: Overall, Information Technology, Midwest, and Supporting Family Caregiving. The annual U.S. News Best Companies to Work For ratings recognize companies that best support employees’ day-to-day experience. For this year’s rankings, U.S. News evaluated nearly 1,100 privately held companies and nonprofits using publicly available data, including employee reviews, court records, financial strength, and governance information. Companies did not apply for consideration, submit data, or pay a fee to be evaluated. 

In the U.S. News evaluation, Fortra received perfect scores of 5 out of 5 for both work-life balance and flexibility, and physical and psychological safety. Additionally, the company was awarded strong scores for job and company stability, belongingness and esteem, and career opportunities and professional development. Together, they point to an environment in which employees are supported in their work, encouraged to grow, and given the flexibility to balance their professional and personal lives. 

New data on future of VDI and workspace delivery put out by Recast Software

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 30, 2026 by itnerd

Recast, in partnership with Nerdio and VMblog, today released the findings of the 2026 State of VDI Survey in a new report, “VDI Isn’t Done. It’s Being Reworked.” The results show that VDI remains part of the workspace mix, but many IT teams are changing how they operate, secure, and support these environments. Notably, administrators lack confidence in their ability to patch VDI environments in a timely manner, making them prone to risk.

VDI is not being abandoned, but it is being actively retooled

Contrary to industry lore, VDI isn’t dead. However, it is evolving. Only 2% of respondents planned to exit an existing deployment entirely in the next 12 to 18 months, while 49% of current users reported a significant change to their VDI, Cloud PC, or published application environment over the last two years. Plans were mixed across keeping, expanding, replacing, reducing, evaluating, or starting deployments, which points to active modernization rather than a broad move away from VDI.

VDI teams lack confidence that their environments are being patched on time

The survey highlights a patch confidence gap between operations and security. Among current users, only 34% were very or extremely confident that required operating system and third-party application updates were being applied on time. Security concerns extended beyond access, with 47% citing audit logging and traceability, 41% citing data leakage controls, and 31% citing patch or vulnerability exposure windows. Although confidence is not proof of failure, it is an important operating signal. Secure access matters, but teams also need timely updates, clear reporting, and proof that controls are working.

The real cost of VDI is the burden of everyday operational work

Performance variability was the top operational pain point at 41%, but 53% of current users cited at least one lifecycle-related issue, including image management and update effort, application delivery or updates, or user profiles and personalization. Additionally, 32% of current users cited high ongoing cost, and 61% of those asked about barriers to change cited budget constraints. Together, the findings suggest that much of the cost and friction in VDI comes from the everyday work of keeping environments current, usable, and supportable.

The report is based on a significant number of responses from IT professionals with awareness of VDI, Cloud PCs, and published applications. Percentages are rounded, and some questions were multi-select.

Nomerra raises $2 million to tackle private markets’ looming paperwork crisis

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 30, 2026 by itnerd

Private markets are on track to triple from $13 trillion to over $30 trillion in the next few years, but the operational work underneath has not kept up. It still runs through emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems, while the industry is running out of people who can hold it all together. Nomerra has raised $2 million to make private market operations AI-native for the asset servicers and asset managers behind the world’s fastest-growing capital market.

Nomerra has secured $2 million in its first round of funding, making it one of the largest FinTech pre-seed rounds this year. The round was led by 14Peaks Capital, with participation from Redstone Fintech and senior individuals from firms including KKR and Intapp.

The company was founded by Johannes Gebendorfer and Jakob Zacherl, who were both first employees at bunch, a tech-enabled fund administrator that recently announced its Series B and has raised more than $50 million. They helped scale the team to more than 100 people and expand across Europe. Both saw firsthand how AI transforms private market operations and founded Nomerra to bring that shift to the industry at large.

In their previous roles, the founders realized that everything that makes public markets efficient simply does not exist for private markets: there is no standardization, no interconnectedness, no efficient record-keeping. The same data gets manually retyped between isolated systems and spreadsheets, often multiple times for a single transaction. Meanwhile, private markets have become much more complex to operate in recent years: new investor channels, more frequent reporting, tighter regulation, semi-liquid structures, evergreens and expansion into novel asset classes all add more operational load. The industry’s default response has been to hire more people, but the right people are getting harder to find. As private markets triple in size over the next five years, the number of qualified accountants has decreased by a third over the last decade.

Nomerra tackles this by making private market operations AI-native, starting with the scattered, high-volume work enterprise asset servicers and managers still run by hand: fund accounting, treasury and transfer agency. It is the work that runs in the background, but holds the entire industry together.

Nomerra connects to the systems firms are already using, including ERPs, banking platforms, email and document storage. It pulls information into a single context layer so agents can see everything a human operator would see. From there, Nomerra agents follow the firm’s own operating procedures: reading documents, extracting the right data, cross-checking it across sources, and delivering outcomes the same way a trained team member would. Users hand off work to Nomerra agents through tools they’re already in or by setting up continuously running background agents.

The goal is to shift people from preparing deliverables to reviewing them. Nomerra agents handle the end-to-end execution and present the output in purpose-built review interfaces with a full audit trail: what was done, why, and where the data came from. Over time, even the review layer becomes supervisory, and teams orchestrate fleets of Nomerra agents that ship entire deliverables on their own.

More capital than ever is expected to flow into private markets, and every manager and servicer needs to be ready to capture their share. Nomerra gives them the bandwidth to do it, letting firms scale without being bottlenecked by operations. The company will use the funding to grow its engineering team and meet surging demand for AI solutions across enterprise asset servicers and managers in Europe and the United States.

Challengermode partners with WBSC to deliver competition technology infrastructure for the WBSC eBaseball Series

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 30, 2026 by itnerd

Challengermode today announced a landmark partnership with the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC), becoming the Official Gaming Platform of the WBSC eBaseball™ Series. The partnership will initially cover the 2026 and 2027 seasons and will culminate with the second edition of the WBSC ePremier12, the flagship international eBaseball competition featuring the world’s top-ranked players.

This collaboration marks an important step in the continued development of WBSC eBaseball™, bringing Challengermode’s competitive gaming technology and tournament infrastructure to one of the fastest-growing digital extensions of international sport.

Through the partnership, Challengermode will provide a dedicated home for WBSC eBaseball™ competitions and rankings, creating a centralized competitive environment for players, National Federations, tournament organizers and gaming communities around the world.

With millions of users across its platform and a strong presence within the competitive gaming ecosystem, Challengermode will support WBSC in connecting baseball and softball with the global gaming community through accessible, scalable and automated competition technology.

The partnership will initially cover the 2026 and 2027 seasons and will culminate with the second edition of the WBSC ePremier12, the flagship international eBaseball competition featuring the world’s top-ranked players.