Only 20% of people impacted by hearing impairment seek treatment. Nearly half of people (46%) with hearing loss don’t wear a hearing aid, and more than 50% of those who purchase hearing aids return them. At Auditdata, we aim to change these statistics by providing tools for hearing care professionals that allow them to focus on what matters most: their patients.
That's why we developed Manage, a cutting-edge Practice Management Software (PMS) specifically designed for audiology. Manage empowers hearing care professionals to deliver Best Care Experiences to patients at every stage of their hearing journey, allowing each patient to receive the excellent treatment they deserve.
How can Manage help your clinic’s team deliver Best Care Experiences? Let’s dive into how our unique, fully featured PMS can support your team through the entire customer journey – so you can focus your attention on providing exceptional care and support to your patients.
Pre-Clinic: Streamlining Appointment Scheduling and Patient Engagement
It can take people a great deal of time – an average of seven years – living with hearing loss before they take any action to resolve this issue by visiting a hearing clinic for an exam. Often, people try to “rationalize” their hearing loss, telling themselves that it’s “not that bad” and they don’t really need hearing aids. Perhaps they talk themselves out of seeking treatment because they think they can’t afford it. Frequently, they fear the perceived stigma around hearing aids, worrying that getting the devices may make them appear old, weak, senile, fragile, or any other negative stereotypes around aging.
Younger demographics may try to justify that hearing loss doesn’t happen to people their age. They may think they’re simply “too busy” to go to a hearing clinic because they’re working, in school, traveling, or involved in other activities. Younger people may be concerned that hearing aids would seem “uncool,” make them seem “odd,” or could cause their peers to tease them for being different.
For whatever reason, many people postpone seeking treatment for their hearing loss. When they finally decide to act, it’s important for your clinic to book their appointment quickly and see them right away, before they can “talk themselves out of” going to your hearing practice.
How Manage can assist you in the Pre-Clinic stage:
Appointment Booking
When prospects finally decide to act on their hearing loss, your clinic can easily book their appointment when they call, instantly seeing open appointment spots across all clinic locations and providers.
The scheduler in Manage enhances the appointment booking experience by enabling clinics to instantly view and secure available time slots across multiple locations. This streamlined process facilitates quick and easy scheduling, reducing administrative burdens and ensuring patients can access services promptly, thus improving overall patient satisfaction and clinic efficiency.
Personalized Reminders
Manage allows your team to set up automated, personalized appointment reminders to go out to patients at pre-determined intervals. These reminders help boost show up rates and reduce no-shows that waste your clinic’s time and resources. These friendly reminders can be automatically sent by email, text, or a combination of both.
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In-Clinic: Personalizing Patient Interactions for Optimal Care
When patients come to your clinic – whether it’s their first visit or they’ve been coming to your practice for years – it's essential to make each person feel comfortable and valued. Every member of your staff – from the front desk team that greet them when they arrive to the clinician that performs their exam – should pay attention to them and treat them like an individual with specific (and important) needs. Manage can help your team accomplish this.
The workflow – and other systems and features in Manage – directs users to the right section, so your employees don’t have to spend their time trying to figure out where things are within the system. Our solution is incredibly intuitive and easy to use, making it efficient for your staff to get to the correct place within the system.
How Manage can assist you in the In-Clinic stage:
Guided workflows
The workflows within Manage have each step of the appointment clearly laid out, so the provider always knows what to do. That way, they can spend more time focusing on the patient in front of them, and less time worrying about the technology, the administrative work, or what comes next in the exam. This also ensures that every patient receives the same kind of high-quality treatment determined by your clinic.
The survey function
Clinicians can (and should!) ask about each patient's lifestyle during the appointment to be able to offer the best solution for the patient’s unique needs and keep detailed notes, information, and data in the patient’s records. Manage makes it easy to refer back to those notes, make changes in the journal section, and add new information. This means patient records are always accurate, updated, and simple to access. In addition to keeping clinical notes, providers can also track information about each patient’s family, hobbies, etc., to personalize future conversations and interactions. This “personal touch” helps patients feel valued and appreciated, and is integral to boosting customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and Best Care Experiences.
Noah integration with Bridge
When collecting clinical data, there’s no need to double your work by adding information twice. Our Noah integration with Bridge eliminates redundancies, centralizing data to one place. For instance, after conducting a hearing exam, this feature takes the data from the audiogram and saves it – accurately and seamlessly – from the Noah software to the patient's record in Manage. Even if you’re working offline – seeing patients out in the community – this solution will store the data and then, once you’re back in the clinic and re-connected to the Internet, will seamlessly sync the data to Manage.
Billing and Reimbursements
Audiology billing and reimbursements can be a complicated, time-consuming process, but it’s critical to get it right or your clinic might not get paid! Luckily, Manage makes this complex effort easier, helping your employees streamline, automate, and simplify these critical financial tasks to ensure that you maximize your collections. For instance, your employees can use our PMS to verify patients’ insurance eligibility and benefits in real-time and submit claims electronically to expedite reimbursement. Additionally, Manage can track claims’ status and flag any outstanding payments. This helps reduce your team’s administrative burden so employees can focus more time and energy on patient-facing tasks, providing Best Care Experiences to everyone who visits your clinic. Manage helps your staff do more of what they love – providing exceptional care – and streamline the tasks your staff may not love as much – handling billing and reimbursement!
Aftercare: Enhancing Long-Term Satisfaction and Hearing Aid Success
The hearing care journey doesn’t stop when your patients walk out of your clinic with their new hearing aids. In fact, your patients will still need your clinic’s ongoing attention to ensure that their devices are working optimally, determine if they’re adjusting well to their new hearing aids, help clean and maintain their devices, and check their hearing loss (and hearing health) at regular intervals. Therefore, aftercare is an important part of each patient’s journey – and is essential to providing Best Care Experiences for your customers.
In fact, when hearing aid users experience aftercare with their hearing providers, they have a higher-than-average satisfaction rate – 85% – with their hearing aids. Audiologists must emphasize the importance of hearing aid aftercare, so make this a part of your clinic’s standard workflow. Have your clinicians explain how these follow-up appointments are essential to optimize hearing aid performance and help prevent potential problems with the devices down the road.
How Manage can help you provide better aftercare:
Integrations through Zapier
Use Zapier to effortlessly connect Auditdata Manage with various other applications such as accounting, CRM systems, inventory, and user management platforms. Zapier is a tool that automates workflows by connecting different apps and services without the need for custom coding. This seamless integration through Zapier optimizes your hearing clinic’s operations, eliminates redundant data entry, minimizes errors, and improves efficiency. By linking Manage with Zapier, your staff can use resources more wisely, streamline administrative tasks, and spend less effort on time-consuming clinic oversight, allowing more time to provide Best Care Experiences for every patient."
Marketing efforts
Ongoing marketing efforts can help keep your clinic top-of-mind with your patients, reminding them to come in for regular hearing aid cleaning and maintenance, and schedule follow-up examinations, as needed. Manage seamlessly integrates with your clinic’s chosen marketing tools to send out birthday letters, holiday cards, electronic newsletters and e-blasts, email reminders, and other customer appreciation messages.
Use Manage to inform your customers about clinic news – such as new staff members, products, locations, etc. – as well as upcoming events, like free hearing aid cleanings, extended hours, meet and greets, lunch and learns, wellness fairs, community events, and more. Staying in touch with your patients throughout the year is a smart way to maintain strong relationships and offer Best Care Experiences that extend beyond “just” the exam room.
Automating aftercare tasks
It’s important to stay in touch with patients and have them come in for regular follow-up aftercare visits. Manage can help you keep patients engaged by automating follow-up calls, texts, and emails to set up aftercare appointments. Then, use the PMS to send automated reminders to boost show-up rates and help reduce or eliminate no-shows. Additionally, Manage can send automated reminders at certain intervals to encourage patients to come in and have their hearing aids cleaned and serviced to keep them performing optimally.
Manage Manage can also inform customers of upcoming hearing aid cleaning events at your clinic or out in the community, to keep them connected with your hearing practice and ensure that more patients’ hearing aids are serviced at these events.
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Resources
⭐️ Audiology Practice Management Software - Auditdata Manage
Notifications and Patient Engagement
⭐️ Common Audiometry and Hearing Loss Myths
⭐️ Why People Don't Wear Their Hearings Aids - Responding to Common Hearing Aid Objections
⭐️ The Benefits of Automated Reminders in Hearing Healthcare
⭐️ The Role of the Front Office in Maximizing Patient Retention
⭐️ Forbes Health Survey: Nearly Half Of People With Hearing Loss Believe There Is A Hearing Aid Stigma