Hear In Private Practice

If you are a Medicare Provider do you and your staff know the rules you have to follow for Medicare?  If you are a patient, why will some places give you a “free” test and others will not?  Answering these answers requires covering a lot of ground. What prompted these questions was a class I taught concerning insurance in “Business

What do you do when a patient arrives in your office with a broken, damaged or lost custom hearing aid?  How can we serve our patient when Buster has gotten a hold of their hearing aid, again?  Do patients just have to “get by” if they don’t own their own backups? We’ve always felt that we had a contract of

Pretty much weekly, a patient contacts our office with the report of a lost or damaged hearing aid.  The stories range from the mundane to the miraculous.  Common among the reports are that the device was lost in the sheets during a hospital stay.  Almost equally common is “the dog ate my hearing aid”.  We have personal experience with this

I don’t really mean that our patients are beasts, but let’s face it, buying hearing aids is about as much fun as replacing a transmission or a roof for most folks.  Especially the first timers!  They don’t want hearing aids, they don’t want to need hearing aids.  Really now, who can blame people for being a bit grumpy?  They haven’t

Hopes Dashed In my last post  I told the sad, sad story of how we thought we had a compelling business case for the creation of a hearing loop distribution company.  We had a “ringer” (in more ways than one!) for a partner and we were going to import and distribute home loop systems to hearing care professionals. Since we had

We reach out to physicians by sending monthly fax and email educational pieces.  Our Audiologist Diana Holan, MS, wrote this section for a recent physician outreach.  I wanted to pass it along in today’s post. Incidence of hearing loss as a side effect of chemotherapy (i.e. cisplatin and carboplatin) is well documented, although it usually is reported only for patients

In our practice, we have been including installed home loops with the purchase of T coil equipped hearing aids for 10 years. We find that our patients are happier with their devices since they can once again successfully hear and enjoy watching TV.   Our return rates are reduced and our patients are more likely to tell their friends about

For this series on pricing strategies, we have analyzed the historical perspective on the development of retail prices, finding your own “magic formula”, and looked at the individual considerations that should be a part of that formula (e.g., warranty, invoice cost, accessories, cost-of-living adjustments).  For the past few posts we have been discussing the ethical use of manufacturer loyalty programs

As clinicians, whether we are dispensers or audiologists, most of the people we come into contact with ask us about the effects of medication on hearing and balance.  We also query patients on their medications as part of the the history taking portion of diagnostic evaluations. But how many of us look up each medication?  We are familiar with some

So, here I am in Boston waiting for the 24th Annual AudiologyNow, doing my work sabbatical and catching up on old projects.  I discussed this concept a few weeks ago, a practice I started several years ago in order to actually complete the goals which never seems to happen when I’m in my office.  For me, this is a vacation