Millions of people across the world lose a significant portion of their ability to hear every year. Studies show that over 40% of the 50+ population in the UK are currently suffering from hearing loss in varying degrees of severity. Therefore, it would almost be an understatement to say that hearing care specialists are needed everywhere. Unfortunately, not all hearing care professionals are able to fully realize their professional potential. If you can relate to that statement and you wish to grow your practice beyond its immediate limitations, the following suggestions should help.
Get the Exposure You Need to Grow
Irrespective of how good you might be at what you do, it won’t matter much without the right kind of exposure. You must be able to reach your target patients beyond the current scope. Your practice should be visible to related hearing care businesses of relevance and size. This is easier said than done, of course, especially since it’s a niche sector within the massive healthcare industry.
However, connecting with a large, multinational corporation that is looking to build professional relationships with emerging hearing care specialists can make everything fall into place. For example, if you partner up with one of the biggest designers and manufacturers of hearing aid systems, you will receive immediate exposure, support, and the tools you need to grow the business. Find out exactly how to do that and what to expect from such a partnership by visiting www.phonak.com/en-uk/professionals/become-a-partner.
Provide a Comprehensive Service at Your Hearing Care Clinic
There are quite a few different specialists and professionals who work within the hearing care industry. They each have their own roles and ideally, there should be enough, diversely qualified hearing care professionals in the clinic to provide patients with comprehensive care, if needed.
Maintaining a diverse set of skilled professionals at an audiology clinic also ensures that every patient finds the specialist they need exactly to aid them with their auditory issues. If maintaining such a complete employee base of qualified hearing care specialists is too expensive for the clinic at this point, try and expand with a priority base model.
Add one new specialist and only choose them if their specialty is something that the clinic lacks. Patient queries and online data analytics should help in determining that. As a rule, the following three hearing care specialists are the most important hearing care professionals in the clinic.
Otologist – Otolaryngologists are commonly known as ENT specialists because they are fully qualified physicians who specialize in treating diseases, disorders, and conditions of the ears, the nose, and the throat. An otologist is an otolaryngologist who further specializes in diagnosing and treating hearing issues, especially those that originate from the inner ear and the auditory nervous system. An otologist is usually the most qualified medical professional in a hearing care clinic.
Audiologist – Every hearing care and aid clinic has at least one audiologist. They are highly qualified professionals with extensive knowledge of the human auditory system. Audiologists have the training, certification, and skills needed to check, test, diagnose, and treat most hearing disorders.
Hearing Instrument Specialist – They are experts in all things related to hearing aid systems and instruments. That is to say, a hearing instrument specialist is qualified and trained to suggest, design, create, modify, test, evaluate, prepare, adjust, fit, and even repair hearing aids, as well as other related instruments.
Unify Your Data with Upgraded Software Resources
Software is an integral part of everything nowadays and no healthcare business sector is an exception to that. In fact, some of the niche medical software resources such as EHRs are more technical, and they must be operated by trained medical coders only.
Due to how essential software resources are for medical professionals and healthcare businesses in general, massive progress has been made here. Unfortunately, very few hearing care professionals have updated their systems to reflect that improvement.
For example, neither you nor any of your employees should be wasting time with multi-interface manual data entry in 2023, simply because the clinic’s practice and business systems are still separate. It wastes time and leaves a lot of room for errors when you must look through multiple software systems and enter the different data from the different systems manually.
Upgrade to an integrated software solution instead that merges your audiology clinic’s practice information with its business information within one unified, secured system. A unified audiology clinic management system can easily connect and autofill repetitive, but subtly different entries in seconds without errors.
There will still be some manual work of course, but it becomes so much easier when all you need to do is look through just one interface. It saves time, improves productivity, and reduces mistakes, as compared to the complications of having to search and match with multiple systems.
Other than that, an integrated system with unified clinical practice data and business data would be capable of providing you with significantly more useful and accurate KPIs for strategizing your audiology clinic’s growth. Also, check to see if your current software solution comes with useful modern features such as automatic and programmable appointment reminders for both clients and the concerned hearing care professionals.
