Hearing Care Workflows – Best Practice Steps

No two clinicians run the same appointment the same way. One takes a full lifestyle history before the audiogram, another gets to it at the end, and a third is interrupted before it happens at all. Multiply that across a team, then across locations, and consistency becomes something you hope for rather than something you can count on.

A guided workflow settles the order. It is a set of steps that takes a clinician through an appointment, from confirming patient details to booking the follow-up, so nothing depends on memory. Built into your Practice Management Software, those steps produce steadier patient flow, better use of clinical time, and the same appointment whether a patient sees their usual clinician or someone covering for them.

This guide covers three things: the best practice workflows for each appointment type, the practical steps to improve how those workflows run, and how to build and customize them in Auditdata's Practice Management Software, Manage™.

No clinician needs convincing that care should center on the patient. What is harder is making it happen in every appointment, across every clinician. A patient's lifestyle and goals only shape their treatment if someone asked about them, wrote them down where the next clinician would look, and acted on them at the fitting. Miss any one of those and the intent was there but the care was not.

This is where guided workflows come in. They give every clinician the same sequence to follow, so the steps that matter happen whether it is a first appointment or a follow-up with someone else's patient.

List of Best Practice Workflows

The workflows below share a frame. They open with patient details, consent, and referable conditions, and close with the management plan, referral, next appointment, and invoice. What changes is the clinical work in the middle, and which questionnaires the appointment calls for.

In Manage™, Auditdata's Practice Management Software, the steps are prompted as the clinician works through them, and the hearing test runs through Bridge, its cloud-based Noah integrator, so clinical data lands straight in the patient record.

Having workflows in place is not the same as having workflows that work. A sequence can be correctly built and still fall apart in practice, because a step is unclear, because the information it needs was never captured, or because the clinician has learned it is faster to skip it. The four steps in this chapter follow the appointment from the first conversation to the follow-up, and look at what makes each one work.

An audiogram tells you the degree and configuration of hearing loss. It does not tell you that the patient has stopped going to their book club, or that the part of their day they most want back is the phone call with their daughter. Both belong in the treatment decision, and only one of them is captured automatically.

The questions that surface the second kind of information are not complicated:

• Where does hearing become difficult? Crowded restaurants, the car, a meeting room?

• What have they stopped doing because of it?

• Is the phone a problem, and is that work, family, or both?

• What would they most want to hear clearly again?

What matters is that the answers are recorded rather than remembered. A lifestyle history taken in conversation and left in the clinician's head is lost by the fitting appointment, and lost entirely if a colleague picks up the case. When the workflow prompts the question and stores the answer against the patient record, it is still there when the device is selected, when the fitting is verified, and at every follow-up after that.

Recommending a device is where the lifestyle history earns its place. Without it, the recommendation defaults to the audiogram and the price point, which is how a patient ends up with a device that performs well on paper and disappoints them in a restaurant.

The same applies to what the patient was hesitant about. Someone who agreed to a hearing aid while uneasy about how visible it would be needs that noted, because it predicts how the fitting goes and whether the device comes back. Someone told the device would help in meetings has set an expectation that will be measured at the follow-up. The clinician at the fitting appointment inherits the decision. Whether they also inherit the reasoning depends on the workflow.

Complex cases raise the same question in a harder form. When a case needs an ENT or another professional, the referral is only useful if what prompted it, what was found, and what came back is all visible in one place. Referrals that live in email threads are referrals that get chased twice.

Two patients with the same audiogram, the same prescription, and the same device can walk out with different experiences. Amplification depends on the ear it is delivered into, and no two ear canals are the same.

Real Ear Measurement (REM) is the best practice for hearing aid fittings, delivering better results and happier patients. REM is a great way to determine whether a hearing aid user is receiving the precise level of amplification needed at every frequency to improve their hearing. REM helps ensure that the patient is receiving the correct amplification level – not too much where everything is too loud and jarring, and not too little, where the patient still has trouble hearing, even when wearing the hearing aids.

Often, patients were unhappy with the fit of the devices, improper amplification levels, or competing background noise, among other reasons.

A fitting appointment carries a lot at once. The patient is hearing through a new device and forming a first impression of it, and the practical instructions about cleaning, charging, and when to call have to fit around that.

What makes the difference is whether the follow-up is booked rather than left to the patient to initiate. Patients do not call about the things that are only slightly wrong, and those are exactly the things that turn into an unworn device. A scheduled aftercare appointment catches them, and catches them while the trial period is still open. That is what the aftercare workflow in chapter 1 is for: a fixed return point where use is reviewed, adjustments are made, and the patient asks the questions they have actually run into.

Manage™ is Auditdata's Practice Management Software for multi-location audiology clinics, designed to help hearing care networks standardize care. The built-in guided workflows let clinicians:

• Follow the same sequence for every appointment type

• Work through steps customized to how your practice runs

• Complete every action in one place, from scheduling to invoicing and documentation

No steps get missed, so the standard is the same, whoever is in the room.

Manage Clinical Activities and Tasks with Guidance And Efficiency

Clinical activity guidance as a workflow provides audiologists with step-by-step guidance for clinical tasks, such as hearing exams, treatments, and procedures. This feature supports audiologists in delivering high-quality, consistent care by providing clear, concise instructions for clinical tasks. With the workflow feature, you get access to relevant patient data, such as medical history and test results, which can help you make more informed decisions.

Personalize Treatment Plans for Every Patient

Custom treatment plans guide audiologists through a streamlined step-by-step workflow to create personalized and effective treatment plans that meet the unique needs and preferences of each patient. The custom treatment helps audiologists deliver consistently high-quality care and improve patient outcomes.

Customize Your Own Guided Activity Workflow

You can build guided workflows and customize them to fit the specific needs and processes of your practice. This allows you to tailor the workflows and ensure that your staff follows consistent and standardized procedures.

By implementing these workflows, clinicians can provide high-quality patient-centered care that considers and customizes the unique needs and preferences of each individual patient.

Our editor is user-friendly and you don't need any programming skills to use it. You can add or remove steps, change the order of steps, and edit the content of individual steps. This flexibility ensures that your workflows are optimized for your practice and can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your clinical processes.

Measuring Workflow Performance

Once you set up the different workflows in your hearing clinic, you need to understand how they perform. There are many ways to measure and track your workflows.