Daily Archives: December 15, 2016

3 Important Considerations For Your Next Healthcare Plan

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With the amount of different healthcare plans out there, along with all the junk mail you’re no doubt being bombarded with, choosing health insurance can be a pretty daunting prospect. However, unless you’re fine with ruining your personal finances when life throws you a curveball, it’s a necessary evil! If you’re having a hard time comparing your options, here are some of the main considerations you should go through.

Your Doctor

There are a lot of popular health plans which will require you to use the insurer’s own network of doctors and specialists. Like many, you might already have a certain doctor who you’d like to carry on going to. If this is the case, then be sure to check first and see if your doctor is included in the healthcare plan you’re mulling over. If you don’t have any choice but to switch to a doctor from the insurer’s network, then start researching them instead. Call up the medical office where he or she works to check their credentials, or look them up through the AMA. The doctor’s location and availability are also big factors which need to be considered when you come to choosing your next health plan. You should not only check that they’re conveniently placed, but also that the opening hours of their facility are going to work for you.

Your Specialists

Medical office - middle-aged male doctor greeting patient, shaking hands.

Medical office – middle-aged male doctor greeting patient, shaking hands.

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Perhaps you have a specific medical condition which requires you to see a specialist, or you believe you may need to seek out a specialist in the future. In this situation, it’s important to figure out for certain how you’ll be able to reach this specialist as and when you need to. Like with my first point, it’s a good idea to check whether or not any current specialists that you go to are part of the networks for insurers that are within your price range. You also need to find out whether or not you’ll be required to contact your primary care physician before going to any given specialist. Of course, some rarer conditions are going to have serious ramifications on the health plan you need, and the specialists you’ll need access to. Sometimes, this can require the input of an accountant who deals with insurance consultancy. If you want more information, view it at BSWllc.com.

Prescription Coverage

Like countless other people, you might currently be on prescription medication for an ongoing condition. If this is the case or there’s a high chance that you’ll need prescription medication in the future, then you’ll need to narrow your search down to plans that have good prescription drug coverage. Remember that this kind of coverage can vary a lot from one plan to the next. You may get no coverage, complete and universal coverage, but more likely you’ll have to find a plan that’s somewhere in the middle, with different conditions for different drugs or varying co-pays. Furthermore, if you’re unable to get your prescriptions in a generic form, this will have a big impact on how much you’ll pay for each prescription.

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Taking The Shortcuts To Building A Real Connection To Your Customers

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The relationship between customer and business is one that can spend years in a state of flux or go to an extreme in a matter of moments. The wrong solution or the wrong message can ruin the whole relationship. The right approach can create the kind of brand loyalty that you might have thought only possible for the biggest of businesses. Here, we’re going to look at how you make steps to creating the best customer relationship you can.

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Make life as easy for them as possible

Regardless of what you’re offering them and what you find out about them, the fact is that a business shouldn’t be hard to do business with. Any barriers that separate you from your customers need to be eliminated. On your website, this might mean simplifying navigation and creating a much more streamlined e-commerce approach. In physical retail, this means making sure that your services are accessible, especially when it comes to payment. If you’re not using things like merchant services to offer more payment options to your customers, then they may just well look elsewhere. Keeping your business accessible to your market is vital if you want to have any kind of relationship with your customers.

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Listen to them

That same level of ease and flexibility should go into how you conduct customer communication. A lot of smaller businesses, in particular, tend to have a hard time listening to criticism. Instead of offering support, they can get defensive. Besides listening to them in person and offering customer support, seek their advice online. Ask for testimonials, send out surveys through social media, ask them what they think of you. You might not like some of the answers, but its crucial to understanding the marketing that you’ve found yourself in. Even being willing and open to listening to feedback, and sometimes showcasing the changes you make in response, can win you a lot of respect from existing and potential customers alike.

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Get some insight

A customer might be able to tell you about how they think and feel about your business. However, they’re not always the most reliable people to talk to when it comes to finding out what they want. A better way to do that is just let them show them. For instance, you can use customer relationship management tools to compile all sorts of data on them that allows you some insight into those wants. You can use your website as a tool to the same ends, too. Heat maps can show what parts of the website garner more attention that others. If you use a search bar on your site, realize how useful a tool that can be as well. The results of search bar analysis give you a direct look at what your customers are looking for.

Knowing their wants and needs and knowing that you don’t know everything is important. You need to be open in the relationship and willing to listen, as you should be in all relationships. Sometimes that also means reading between the lines and doing a little digging to find what they really want.

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Surviving Sickness Solo: How To Deal With Being Ill When You Live Alone

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Most of us are independent enough to live alone and get by. But what happens when illness strikes? Living with someone, you can always rely on them to be your carer for the day, but living alone, you have to be your own carer. If you’ve recently fallen ill and have to deal with it yourself, here are some ways to cope through the period.

Prepare an emergency illness bag

For when illness strikes, you should have a bag of emergency medical supplies by your bed. This could include painkillers, allergen medicine, prescription drugs, anti-diarrhoea pills and any other emergency medicine that you can think of. Having this within arm’s reach of your bed, either underneath or in a bedside cabinet, can stop you having to trek downstairs and give you the rest you need.

Cut down on chores

This will depend on how long the sickness spell lasts, but realistically you shouldn’t be trying to hoover the house and clean the toilet and run cleaning errands when you’re ill. You need to get rest, and that means not being so active. You can catch up with all this when you are well. Any visitors will understand if your house is a mess.  

Order online

You’ll have to eat when you’re ill. If you can’t face cooking, order a takeaway to your house. Similarly, for any resources you may need, prevent having to go down to the shops by ordering online. Forcing yourself constantly out of bed to do errands will not help your recovery.

Open a window

That said, you’ll need to still get some fresh air. Staying cooped up indoors with no windows open could make it hot and stuffy, a perfect breeding ground for bacteria that could make your illness worse. If going outside is too much of struggle, have a window open that you can regularly walk to get fresh air.

Call for help

Realistically, you’re never going to be able to cope entirely on your own, especially for illnesses lasting more than a couple of days. There are many emergency healthcare services that can help you cope if you don’t have any family or friends available (read this new info about Our Urgent Care to give you an idea of such services). It’s worth keeping a number of one of these whilst ill, in case you have a nasty fall or things take a bad turn.

Know when you can no longer cope and don’t try to suffer through it. For lengthy periods of illness, you may have to hire housekeepers or have people to run errands for you such as shopping, posting letters and cleaning the place up.

Let work know immediately and keep them informed of the progress of your illness. You may be able to work from home, but don’t push yourself if staring at a screen is making your migraine worse or your telephone manner is compromised by how ill you sound. For the self-employed it can be handy to have a deputy staff member that can take over or have insurance system in place to protect against when you are ill and business can no longer run.

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How To Write A CV That Gets You Noticed

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If you’ve never written a CV or Resume before, it can be quite a daunting and, somewhat overwhelming task.

Of course there are many resources and templates online that can guide you, but sometimes you can lead yourself down a rabbit hole of looking at these too much, and not just focusing on the basics.

The important thing to remember with a CV is, the intention of it is to pique interest in you enough to get you noticed, and have the potential employer wish to speak to you – they don’t want to see every single detail of your life, what you do at the weekend for fun, how much you love the Batman movies, or what you had for dinner last night.

Sure, they want to know a bit about who you are, because this allows them to see if you could be a potential good fit for the company overall, but they’re really just looking for an overview.

Here are a few tips for you to use when creating your first or next CV.

Length:

The length of your CV is quite important, and the key is to give enough information for relevance, but keep it as short as you can to give that information. Usually a CV should be about 1-2 A4 pages. Unless it’s extremely relevant to the position you’re applying for, then any more than that is simply not required, and they may not even read it all. People are busy, so they don’t have time to read all that – they simply want an introduction to you, and will ask you more details during the interview stage.

Format:

Despite what some people believe, there really is no right or wrong way to format a CV. You definitely want it to read easy, so creating sections, short sentences, and avoiding massive paragraphs that just seem like a wall of words is all you really need to do.

Start with your personal details at the top of the page, such as your name, address, date of birth and contact details. Then create sections for education, employment history, skills, passions, and hobbies.

Also don’t be afraid to be honest about where you feel your strengths and weaknesses are: this, if nothing else, shows that you’re honest, willing to improve, and can acknowledge that you’re human and can overcome failures.

Each of these, obviously apart from the education and employment history should simply be a sentence or two.

Information:

When writing a CV, there are some people out there who will encourage you to exaggerate or even downright lie about your skills, passions, and even your education and employment background. This is not only a bad idea due to being morally wrong, but it’s incredibly silly due to being illegal in some places, and at the very least, if found to be lying or withholding important information on a CV, you would most certainly lose your job, and may have trouble finding another one. So, before you go applying for Science Jobs that you’re not properly qualified for, then you should maybe re-think that plan.

The thing is: if there’s a job you do want, but you’re not qualified for, then there are always ways around that, such as applying for an internship or entry-level position and working your way up, or even getting some qualifications that may be needed.

Honesty is always the best policy.

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3 Simple Ideas For Turning Your Life Around In 2017

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Have you felt a little down recently? Are you in your twenties and thinking “there must be more to life than this”? Then you’ve come to the right place. We’re currently approaching Christmas, and that means the new year is just around the corner. That’s a fantastic opportunity for you to do something exciting and turn your life around. Nobody wants to see the same old dull surroundings all their life, and nobody intends to work a dead-end job. So, now is the time to make a plan for the future and try to increase your opportunities. Of course, you are the best person to work out the finer details. I just wanted to offer some suggestions.

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Move to a different country

The idea of moving abroad excites many people. However, they often feel that turning their dream into a reality is impossible. That simply isn’t the case! Most countries have reasonable immigration rules, and so anyone can achieve that goal. You just need to understand which stipulations you need to satisfy. For instance, Canada is always on the lookout for manual workers, and the same applies to the UK. So, don’t sit at home feeling like you’ve never had the chance to experience other cultures. Anyone could move abroad for a few years and try something new with minimal effort. Also, nothing is stopping you from coming back home if it all goes wrong, but at least you’ll have had the experience.

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Get a college degree

If you’re sick of working low-paid jobs, it could be time to head back to college. Getting a degree could open up an entirely new world of opportunities. You could become a doctor or a lawyer and never have to worry about money again. You could even train to become a nurse or something similar if you want to help people. Just work out what you want to do and start to develop your college application strategy as soon as possible. Contrary to popular belief, it’s never too late to get an education. Being as you’re only in your twenties, you have more than enough time to turn things around. Remember, most people work well into their sixties these days.

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Find a life partner

It’s possible you might feel a little depressed about life recently because you are spending it alone. So, why not try to meet someone special and share your existence? The process is much easier these days thanks to specialist dating websites and apps. Indeed, around 10% of new couples met using the internet last year. It has become a “normal” way to forge relationships with potential partners and change your life. Just make sure you are smart when it comes to the people you choose to meet. Select those who appear to have at least some of the same interests for the best results.

Making those three fundamental changes in 2017 could improve your life considerably. The issue is that most people struggle to identify them without outside advice. So, now you’ve read the information, you should be in the best position to put it to good use. Feel free to share this post with any friends you know are feeling down this holiday season. As I’m sure you understand, self-help is the key to a happy life.

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