New Sources of Revenue for the Audiology Practice

By Soriya Estes, Noël Crosby, and Gyl Kasewurm

This article is a part of the May/June 2021, Volume 33, Number 3, Audiology Today issue.

For the recent AAA 2021 Virtual conference, held April 14–16, 2021, we hosted a roundtable that explored ways in which private clinics can maximize revenue. This article reviews those insights solicited from our colleagues’ best ideas and takes examples from our sister professions of dentistry and optics to replicate efficiencies and create an enhanced patient experience with a wider range of services and product offerings.

From Retail to Details: Using Audiology Assistants to Boost Clinic Efficiency

While new retail products can hold promise for increasing clinic revenue, increasing operational efficiencies and boosting providers’ available time might be an easier sell for some practices. Dr. Soriya Estes found that using audiology assistants offers a cost-effective way to do baseline or annual testing, listening checks, cleaning care, and continued counseling, not to mention giving patients an extended “go-to” resource for Bluetooth troubleshooting, insertion re-instruction, wax-trap support, and all the other new user experiences.

In addition to freeing up the provider, audiology assistants can lend great support to a clinic’s front-line patient-care coordinators so they can focus on phone calls, scheduling, and intake protocols. The training protocol for an audiology assistant varies from state to state. Typically, within a 12-week process, along with supervised hours, an assistant will be ready to take on greater clinical responsibilities and manage hearing aid lab responsibilities. Again, this may allow better patient management and care, with the audiologist maintaining revenue-generating appointments and the assistant tending to more maintenance care.

“Since 2013, our team has been successfully using licensed audiology assistants in the practices,” Dr. Estes says. “Our clinical schedule enables us the ability to have our assistants conduct the first half of the hearing aid fitting appointments to review cleaning, care, insertion, chargers, pairing of phones, and app instructions. The assistant then connects the devices and prepares the probe microphone tips and software for the professional component of the fitting process. Afterward, the audiologist enters the fitting room to perform real-ear, programming, answer any questions, and finalize the fitting process.”