A carpenter wouldn’t build something without their trusty hammer, saw, and other tools. And a chef wouldn’t prepare delicious meals without their pans, knives, and other essentials. Your audiology practice must also use the right tools to drive positive business outcomes, improve clinical care, and maximize successes.   

Running an audiology practice can be challenging, with a range of tasks to manage, including conducting hearing examinations, generating leads, scheduling appointments, invoicing, and marketing.  

To succeed in this highly competitive industry, it’s important to have the right tools to streamline daily tasks, improve clinical care, and drive positive business outcomes.  

There are so many things that you need to do each day to keep your hearing clinic running smoothly, including managing a busy schedule, keeping products in stock, invoicing, generating leads, marketing your practice, and handling reimbursements. It may feel overwhelming, and you might wonder if there’s an easier way to manage it all. Yes, there is! You just need the right tools for success. 

Running a hearing clinic can be complex and demanding, but with the right tools, it can be made much simpler. The increasing demand for better services, increased competition, and the fast-paced nature of the industry can be challenging to handle without a comprehensive Practice Management Software (PMS).  

Scheduling is the backbone of your operations, so use a PMS with an advanced, cloud-based scheduler that allows you to manage schedules in real-time from anywhere and see availability across all your clinic’s locations at-a-glance.  

Not only can a PMS help you schedule appointments, but it can also help reduce missed appointments, which are a huge problem in the audiology industry. The average cost of a missed appointment is $200 and, in the US alone, no shows cost medical practices more than $150 billion each year. A simple – yet effective – way to reduce no-show rates is to send automated appointment reminders through your PMS.   

The right tools will let you optimize your clinical processes, resulting in higher performance, better quality, and happier customers. 

Whether you're doing testing and fitting at your clinic or out in the community, you need a solution that provides flexible, connected, and portable solutions that integrate with other systems, like NOAH. This helps ensure that your customers are properly fitted to improve hearing aid sales and usage rates – and reduce returns.  

Bridge is a cloud-based NOAH integrator in Auditdata Manage, which grants clinicians the ability to store client and audiological data online and access these remotely. Unlike other software systems, where data is stored on local PCs, Bridge enables you to provide care and access measurement and fitting software whether you’re online or offline. 

Audiology clinics should use an advanced audiometer that allows you to perform proper hearing examinations, hearing aid fittings, etc., as well as conduct Real Ear Measurements, which has become a gold standard in audiology.   

Whether you're doing testing and fitting at your clinic or out in the community, you need the right tools.  Ideally, you’ll use an audiometer that offers flexible, connected solutions, letting you customize the modules you need, such as video otoscopy, REM, or speech mapping. Look for a solution that comes with a variety of helpful features, such as customizable clinical workflows and audiometric reminder nudges that help ensure clinicians follow best practice protocols.​​ 

Your audiological equipment should allow clinicians to conduct a variety of hearing tests – including pure tone audiometry, bone conduction, and speech in noise – at your clinic, as well as at nursing homes, retirement communities, senior centers, physicians’ offices, and other community locations.  

Take your clinical performance to the next level with Auditdata Measure, a portfolio of audiological equipment run by advanced software. Measure lets you optimize your clinical processes for higher performance, better quality, and happier customers. Additionally, Auditdata offers a unique calibration SWAP service, to eliminate interruption and downtime.  These features boost customer satisfaction as well as clinical quality and consistency during exams.   

Clinical workflows detail the steps for healthcare treatment in a clear plan or protocol, outlining the timing and sequence of each procedure. Using clinical workflows will help your clinic standardize care, guide clinicians’ decision-making, and ensure that all clinicians follow the same path to provide the most appropriate care, diagnoses, and treatments for your customers. 

Clinical workflows – scientifically based best practice standards – are associated with numerous benefits, including improved customer outcomes, quality and consistency of care, customer safety, and resource optimization.   

Regardless of what type of exam your audiologists are conducting, clinical workflows ensure that they’re following proper procedures, asking all the right questions, and capturing the information they need. When clinicians follow a pre-determined flow, it increases consistency – everyone follows the same procedure, nothing gets lost, and nothing gets forgotten.   

Choose software that includes an automated nudging or reminders feature to help clinicians follow best practice workflows, optimize processes, become more efficient, and improve quality of care. In busy, fast-paced audiology clinics, nudging guides your clinicians through exam workflows, allowing them to focus more on each customer and less on the work processes.  

Nudging ensures that audiologists don’t skip any steps in the exam or forget to ask key questions. This feature also alerts the clinician to let them know if they need to do additional testing and how (and when) to perform it. 

Real Ear Measurement (REM), widely considered the gold standard in audiology, helps determine whether a customer is receiving the precise level of amplification with their hearing aids. 

During REM, the clinician inserts a thin probe microphone into the ear canal along with the hearing aid to measure volume across a range of frequencies. The clinician gets readings of the exact sound levels the customer is receiving from the hearing aid while listening to various recorded sounds.     

This process helps ensure that the customer is receiving the correct amplification level – not too much where everything is too loud and jarring, and not too little, where the customer still has trouble hearing even while wearing the hearing aids.   

Without REM, hearing aid users are likely receiving either too little or too much volume at different frequencies and pitches. It’s essential that your customers can hear properly across a wide range of pitches to maximize their successes with their hearing aids. 

Studies have repeatedly shown that using Real Ear Measurement (REM) during hearing aid fittings delivers better results and happier customers.  So be sure to add this tool to your audiology toolbox. 

Audiology clinics should utilize a portable iPad screening solution, which allows them to conduct hearing screenings anywhere, to generate valuable leads. Place your screener out in the community – in optical shops, doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and more – to create qualified leads and drive business to your clinic.  This tool helps clinics significantly – and cost effectively – boost lead generation. 

Ideally, you’ll use a screener that integrates with your PMS to efficiently and effectively follow up with any consumers whose screening showed a hearing loss. Consumers can take a quick, but effective, two-minute screening on Auditdata’s portable screener, Engage, and the results go directly to Auditdata’s PMS Manage, so your staff can follow up proactively with prospective customers. This streamlined system ensures that you capture and pursue every lead promptly and properly. 

Another way to use the screener is to prequalify leads who are less likely to have hearing loss before they book a time-intensive appointment with one of your clinicians. This allows you to maximize your audiologists’ time, having them only see customers with confirmed hearing loss. 

You can’t fix problems if you’re not aware of them. That’s where reporting comes in. Reporting is essential for audiology clinics, helping you gain valuable insights on every aspect of your business. Reporting can help increase efficiency, reduce errors, optimize operations, benchmark performance, and improve outcomes. 

Using reports can increase your bottom line, as this data provides important insights on clinical quality and business outcomes across your practice, including key performance indicators like sales numbers, hearing aid trials, returns, and more. 

The reports help you see what’s going well across your practice, and can help identify areas of concern – such as underperforming staff members, an inefficient scheduling model, overscheduled clinicians, high return rates, high no-show rates, etc. – so you can proactively take steps to fix these issues. The information obtained from these reports will help your clinic improve workflows, KPIs, transparency, efficiency, and employee performance. 

If (or when) your reports spotlight an issue, you can take proactive steps to resolve it. For instance, if your reports show that you have high no-show rates, you can increase efforts to confirm appointments via email and bilateral texts. Or if your clinic is experiencing high hearing aid return rates, it could mean that your audiologists aren’t performing REM often enough.   

Additionally, these reports can help you improve processes and workflows by identifying any problems that could be wasting time or money. Identifying and fixing even one issue – like optimizing your scheduling – can result in significant cost savings, higher productivity, and happier customers. 

Auditdata Discover, an analytics platform, makes your business transparent by providing metrics that empower you to make fact-based decisions. This reporting function provides critical data, allowing clinic leaders to see valuable information about staffing, scheduling, equipment utilization, reimbursements, etc. to improve transparency and provide a comprehensive picture of your business.