I am your Eyeball Acquisition Specialist. Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to. Find ideas for shopping ideas from Bigdoggpinc. There is only one Bigdoggpinc = Big Dogg Productions Incorporated. I make a big deal for you! I cover alot of stores and services that have been posting deals as great or better then the one-time only Black Friday or Cyber Monday offers.

Do you have high cholesterol? You may be able to join a clinical research study.

(BPT) - Sponsored by Merck

Many people struggle to lower their cholesterol, even though there are medicines available that can help lower LDL-C (the “bad” cholesterol).

High cholesterol, if not treated, can lead to a type of heart disease called atherosclerosis.[1] This disease can raise your chance of having a heart attack or stroke.

“Currently available treatments are effective tools to treat high cholesterol, but some must be provided by a doctor by injection and can be hard for people to access,” said Dr. Christie M. Ballantyne, Professor of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

PCSK9 inhibitors are medications to help treat high cholesterol. Researchers are studying an investigational PCSK9 inhibitor that people can take as a pill once a day by mouth instead of as a shot. Currently, there are clinical studies looking at the safety of this investigational medicine and whether it works. These studies will help researchers better understand whether this medicine can lower LDL-C and the chance of cardiovascular adverse events.

Researchers are looking for people to join these studies. To qualify, you must be aged 18 years or older and you either:

• Take a statin medicine to lower cholesterol but still need to lower your LDL-C
• Have a high chance of having a heart attack or stroke and have high cholesterol even after taking a statin for at least a month

If you join one of these clinical studies, you’ll get the study medicine and study-related medical exams for no cost. You’ll also be paid back for travel-related study costs, such as bus fare or gas for driving to and from the study site. You don’t need health insurance to join.

“These ongoing clinical studies will help us understand whether our investigational once-daily oral PCSK9 inhibitor will be an effective treatment for certain people with high cholesterol,” said Dr. Robert Blaustein, Associate Vice President for Clinical Research, Merck Research Laboratories. “I encourage anyone who meets the eligibility criteria to speak with your health care provider to see if one of the clinical studies may be suitable for you.”

Ask your doctor if joining one of these clinical studies may be right for you. For more information on the clinical studies, visit coralreefstudies.com.

Copyright © 2024 Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ USA, and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

---

[1] Johns Hopkins Medicine. Atherosclerosis. 2021. Accessed December 12, 2023. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/atherosclerosis

Advertisement 

GOVVI Wellness with Bigdoggpinc 

GOVVI is a forward-thinking e-commerce company that has revolutionized the way people shop for lifestyle products. Unlike other companies, GOVVI offers a subscription-based model that enables customers to enjoy exclusive access to the latest and most innovative products at competitive prices.

#Govviwithbigdoggpinc

#GovvilifestylewithBigdoggpinc

#Bigdoggpinc

I am your Eyeball Acquisition Specialist. Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to. Find ideas for shopping ideas from Bigdoggpinc. There is only one Bigdoggpinc = Big Dogg Productions Incorporated. I make a big deal for you! I cover alot of stores and services that have been posting deals as great or better then the one-time only Black Friday or Cyber Monday offers.

Advertisement

How one 'wish kid' got the backyard she always wanted

(BPT) - During the pandemic, little Kennedy and her family practically lived in their backyard all day, every day. Together with her three brothers and her parents, Kennedy loved to engage in active play outdoors, like jumping on their trampoline — even putting up with the nuisance of pervasive sticker burrs throughout the lawn so she could stay outside.

Being at home meant even more to Kennedy and her family since she was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 3. While her medications and treatment sometimes prevent her from enjoying the active play she loves so much, now 6-year-old Kennedy expressed her heartfelt wish to Make-A-Wish — a total backyard makeover.

"Kennedy is obsessed with unicorns, princesses, rainbows and butterflies," said her mother, Kendra. "She loves to play outside, jump on the trampoline, and she loves gymnastics and cheerleading!"

Make-A-Wish creates life-changing wishes for children like Kennedy with critical illnesses in the U.S. and nearly 50 countries worldwide. Together with generous donors, supporters, staff and more than 20,000 volunteers nationwide, the organization delivers hope and joy to children and families when they need it most.

To see Kennedy's wish granted, Make-A-Wish partnered with Topgolf, a sports entertainment complex that features an inclusive, high-tech golf game that everyone can enjoy. Topgolf has been a national corporate partner with Make-A-Wish since 2016, helping raise more than $4 million to help grant wishes just like Kennedy's. Year-round, Topgolf donates $1 to Make-A-Wish from the sale of each order of their injectable donut holes, and also hosts an annual fundraising campaign every April. The company also hosts wish celebrations, send-off parties, wish reveals and welcome home parties for wish kids.

Wishes do come true

The plan for Kennedy focused first on a new in-ground trampoline with a turf perimeter and twinkle lights, together with all new sod to replace the lawn full of the pesky stickers that often made outdoor playtime a challenge.

To add extra fun for Kennedy, Topgolf referred Make-A-Wish to SynLawn, which graciously donated one of their Greenmaker putting greens to the project. Make-A-Wish staff helped the Topgolf crew piece together the Greenmaker putting green (and a new set of just-her-size golf clubs from Topgolf) to help set up the backyard space for the amazing wish reveal day.

Because the wish took a while to grant due to distance and vendor availability, Topgolf invited Kennedy and her family for a day of play at Topgolf in The Colony, Texas, while they were waiting for the big day to arrive. The Topgolf team was very eager to help Kennedy and her brothers play hard and have fun.

"Topgolf pulled out all the stops to shower Kennedy with love from the moment they walked through the front door to the time they left," said Meredith Clements, senior wish manager for Make-A-Wish North Texas.

The big day

To help Kennedy celebrate her big wish reveal day, her parents, her aunt, her cousin, both sets of grandparents and of course Kennedy's three brothers were there, waiting for Kennedy to get home from school.

As she walked into the backyard, all the people she loves held up the letters of her name and cheered as they took in the sight of the totally transformed play space. She first cut through the Make-A-Wish banner at the entrance to the yard, then gleefully jumped on the new trampoline with her brothers and practiced her putting with her dad, Gunter.

"Finding out your child has cancer is one of the hardest things you could ever hear," said Gunter. "When I wondered, 'Why did she wish for a backyard makeover?' I realized that Kennedy put a lot of thought into her wish. I feel like it's going to be making up time for what was lost — the times she couldn't go outside — and now she can do that anytime she wants. She can enjoy walking out of her back door to play golf, jump on the trampoline and do the things she loves."

If you'd like to help make wishes come true for kids just like Kennedy all over the U.S., visit Wish.org — or you can plan a fun trip to a Topgolf location today to buy an order of donut holes or make a donation. Find a venue near you at Topgolf.com.

I am your Eyeball Acquisition Specialist. Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to. Find ideas for shopping ideas from Bigdoggpinc. There is only one Bigdoggpinc = Big Dogg Productions Incorporated. I make a big deal for you! I cover alot of stores and services that have been posting deals as great or better then the one-time only Black Friday or Cyber Monday offers.

Advertisement:

A4C is your one stop shop for all your cell phone accessories. A4C matches quality product with unbeatable prices, a popular combination with today's web-savvy consumers. posted by Bigdoggpinc Category Auto,Computer & Electronics,Telecommunications

4 ways small businesses can innovate without a big budget

(BPT) - By Irana Wasti, Chief Product Officer at BILL

In today's fast-paced business landscape, it’s important for small business owners to adopt a mindset for innovation. However, the misconception that innovation requires vast resources and significant time investment can often deter entrepreneurs and business builders from pursuing new ideas and strategies. But with the right approach and perspective, small businesses can foster a culture within the company to make innovation more of an ongoing tenet of a successful business.

As small businesses look at their goals for the new year, with some businesses also thinking about how to do more with the same, consider these four practical tips to innovate without breaking the bank or spinning too many resources.

1. Nurture an innovation mindset with your team

Innovation starts with your team. Cultivating an innovation mindset among your team members is the first step toward achieving small wins that lead to breakthroughs. As someone who has led product development teams for over 20 years, I know that the ability and willingness to analyze the environment, listen to feedback, and adapt to change are key disciplines to delivering products that delight customers. Here are some key aspects to consider:

Embrace diverse perspectives: Different backgrounds and experiences bring unique viewpoints that can spark creativity and improve collaboration within your organization. Where you can, build diversity into your hiring strategy.

Foster a culture of openness: Create an atmosphere where employees feel safe to share their ideas and insights freely. Make them feel that their opinions matter and that they have a stake in the company's success. You can do this with monthly brainstorm sessions to get the whole team thinking about different challenges faced by the business.

Promote continuous learning: Encourage ongoing learning and skills development. There are lots of free online training resources that help employees stay updated on industry trends and emerging technologies.

By nurturing an innovation mindset within your team, you can tap into their collective creativity, which can lead to cost-effective innovations that drive your business forward.

2. Listen to your customers and innovate for them

Research from McKinsey & Company has shown that improving the client experience can increase sales revenues by 2%–7%. However, one common pitfall in innovation is over-engineering solutions that don't align with your customers' needs. Prioritize innovation that is rooted in customer feedback, provides value, and aligns with business goals, and is measurable. Here are a few ways you can build trust with your customers and serve as a pipeline to fuel innovation:

Provide multi-channel support: For customers who still need help after navigating your educational resources, offer support across the platforms that matter to them — such as email, social media, SMS, in-app support and more. Leverage tech-enabled tools, such as finance software that offers free phone and chat support with live agents. This meets your customers where they are, letting them reach you in a way they find comfortable and convenient.

Deliver a personalized customer experience with AI tools: Chatbots make a particularly helpful AI-powered customer support tool. A chatbot can respond to customers in real time, offering additional information about your products or services or even fielding customer service questions. AI-powered marketing tools can be used for content creation, social media management, and more. Chatbots and other AI tools can do more than just answer customer inquiries about your products. The best AI tools can adapt and learn from customer behavior.

Cascade the outside, inside: Often customer feedback does not go beyond the customer support team. To help drive more organic innovation, enable regular touch points between team members who face customers and team members who are on the front lines of innovation.

By keeping your customers' needs at the forefront of your innovation efforts, you can ensure your new ideas are well-targeted.

3. Ensure your tech tools help you move the business forward

Efficiency is a cornerstone of cost-effective innovation. Leveraging technology to automate manual tasks lets you accomplish more in less time, freeing up valuable staff time to focus on strategic and creative thinking. You want to work with technology partners that can help you customize tools to meet the needs of your business and facilitate integration. Remember that innovation can come from anywhere in your business so keep your automation goals broad. Here's how some small businesses have found solutions that make an impact:

Automate financial operations: Using technology to eliminate manual activities, such as invoicing, bill payments and financial reporting, helps you streamline operations and reduce human error. It also helps you get back to focusing on what matters to you, your business. Finding a solution that pre-populates invoice information can save business owners, on average, 50% of time on bill pay alone. One of BILL’s customers, Ascent Respiratory Care, a home health care provider that helps patients with respiratory issues, eliminated writing paper checks entirely. “We do not write checks anymore. I would say about 95% of what we do is all paid out via BILL, whether it's a hard copy check or an electronic payment,” said Ascent Respiratory Care Senior Business Development Associate Heather Thompson.

Use data analysis to uncover business insights more easily: Solutions that bring efficiency and optimization to your business can provide valuable analytics that can uncover insights to fuel innovation, inform your decision-making and identify areas for improvement. Golf Genius has seen firsthand how financial analytics has provided better control, visibility and efficiency. “I believe we’re saving thousands of dollars a quarter as a result of real-time budget tracking. Before [BILL], people would ask where they were against their budgets, and now we know,” says Golf Genius CFO, Lou Lombardo.

By harnessing technology to optimize key foundational parts of your business operations, you can achieve cost savings and efficiency gains that contribute to your overall business innovation. For example, BILL’s Financial Operations Platform for SMBs allows businesses to manage and optimize their cash flow all on one platform, delivering the most comprehensive suite of capabilities for SMBs.

4. Don't be afraid to fail forward

Innovation is inherently risky, and not every idea will yield immediate success. However, the more efficient and automated some functions or processes are, the more a small business can embrace a culture of "failing forward," where failure is viewed as a learning opportunity rather than a setback. It will help employees have the space and time to be more creative or innovative. Here's how to do it:

Encourage experimentation: As product leaders, oftentimes we tell our peers: “If experiments aren't failing often, then you are not experimenting enough”. Encourage your team to experiment with new ideas and approaches, even if they come with a degree of uncertainty. Build in time to test-run the idea, with an evaluation checkpoint, before implementing it system-wide.

Iterate and refine: After an experiment, assess what worked and what didn't. Use these insights to refine your approach and try again.

Acknowledge lessons learned from failures: Celebrate the lessons learned from failures. This will encourage a culture where innovation is valued regardless of the outcome, giving business owners a competitive edge and supporting employee retention.

Remember that many groundbreaking innovations have emerged from a series of trial and error. By embracing failure as a stepping stone to success, your small business can take actionable steps toward building a culture that promotes creative thinking, and develop innovative solutions without a big investment.

In conclusion, innovation isn't solely reserved for large corporations with deep pockets. Small businesses can thrive in today's competitive landscape by adopting an innovation mindset, listening to customers, harnessing technology to optimize and adapt to market shifts, and being unafraid to experiment and learn from failures. With the right strategies and a commitment to cost-effective innovation, your small business can stay ahead of the curve.

At BILL, we’re 100% focused on helping SMBs to get more control, visibility, and efficiency in their business. Automating financial operations can be a game changer for your business, saving valuable team time on inefficient manual processes and focusing on high-value strategic tasks instead. BILL helps businesses thrive with technology that is powerful, secure, and easy to integrate and use. To learn more, visit Bill.com/Resources.