Dr. Cliff Olson on Future of Audiology Practice and New Partnership with Audigy to Educate Consumers

Welcome to This Week in Hearing. Hello. I’m your host, Bob Traynor. For this episode. Today my guest is Dr. Clifford R Olson or Aka Dr. Cliff. Anyone who spent any time you YouTube or online anywhere has seen his informative consumer videos to introduce audiology and the various concepts that we provide to our patients. Welcome to this Week in Hearing, Cliff, and thanks so much for being with us today. Well, thank you, Bob. I want to say right off the bat that this is actually one of my favorite channels to follow on YouTube. I consume it regularly. I think you get a lot of great people on the show that have done a lot inside of the profession and a lot of stuff that we can learn from. And so I’m just glad to be here and talk with you as well. Thanks so much for the actual recommendation as well, because we all know Dr. Cliff’s recommendations are really followed very closely. So thanks so much for your endorsement to get us started. We always have our guests, even those who maybe don’t need quite the introduction that others do. Give us a brief opening about their journey into audiology and how you got to Applied Hearing Solutions and maybe even a little bit of secret stuff about HearingUP Audiology network. Yeah, absolutely. So, really, my journey into this started really back, I would say, right when I went into the Marine Corps. So I graduated high school in 2000. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I went to community college for a year and a half. I’m like, you know what? College is not for me. And so I decided to join the Marine Corps. It turns out the Marine Corps was also not for me, but when I was in the Marine Corps in boot camp, they actually found a hearing loss in my right ear. So I had to go back into the military audiologist multiple times in boot camp. I had to go to Balboa Hospital in San Diego to get an MRI done. I had absolutely no understanding of why that was necessary at the time, and it was something that they identified that they should have kicked me out of the Marine Corps for. But they asked me if they wanted me to apply for a waiver, and I said, yeah, let’s go ahead and apply for the waiver. And when I got to the end of my four years, I asked them, when I was exiting, did that waiver end up coming through? And they’re like, no, you actually should have been kicked out for your hearing loss. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend my time in the Marine Corps. I got to serve as a scout sniper, which was actually a key part of how I view audiology now, which we may get into a little bit later in this talk, but. It was something that I didn’t really consider at that time. Going into Audiology, I got out of the military. I went through massage therapy school. So I had something to do while I was going through my undergraduate program, ended up going through an exercise science undergraduate program. Quickly decided that, you know what, I did not want to be a personal trainer in my career. And so I started looking at this was around 2011, what the best career fields were her around that time. And I think like US world News or whatever had Audiology ranked as number four that year. And so I’m like, oh, audiology. That’s what I was interacting with, an audiologist when I was in the military. So I looked into it a little bit more, and I ended up applying to a bunch of state schools in Illinois, got into University of Illinois because they had an Illinois Veterans Grant and ended up falling in love with it there. It really ended up progressing from there. When my fourth year externship came around or when I was looking for it, I had one criteria of where I was going to go. The clinic that I go to has to follow best practices, and that was something that was really driven into me, honestly, through reading a lot and watching a lot of content from Audiologists who’ve been around for a while already saying how important it was, dr. Mike Valente, Dr. Doug Beck. And I just was like, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it to the best of my ability. And I ended up finding my way out to Arizona to do my externship. I had a great clinical rotation that I got to learn all about cochlear implants, hearing aids, pretty much everything there except vestibular that’s not in my wheelhouse. And quickly I realized after I did the Student Business Plan competition at the Academy of Doctors of Audiology where I came in second, everyone likes to think that I won, that I did not win it that year. I came in a clear second to a very good team from University of North Carolina. But from that point on, I was like, maybe going into private practice so I can control every aspect of quality of care inside of my own clinic. And I decided to just open up my own clinic, applied Hearing Solutions in Anthem, Arizona, about eight months after I graduated. And really at the time, I had no patience. I think a lot of providers who start up their clinics from scratch, they have no understanding of how to get patients in the door and no patients to work with. So they’re probably good at what they do, but there’s no one coming in. So I decided I’m going to start making some educational videos to make sure that consumers, not just the ones in my local area, but consumers around the world who have hearing loss that they can have access to information about what’s important, about treating their hearing. And that’s really what started the Dr. Cliff AUD YouTube channel. That was around mid 2017 that I started it. It was couple of years after that where I had a friend, Dr. Amit Gosalia, reach out and say, Cliff. You’ve got all this following, you’re getting phone calls from people all over the country. Why don’t you start referring those people out to good providers? And I’m like, well, that’s great, but I don’t know who those providers are. Like, I’ve only been in the profession for two years at that 3 years at that point. And if my credibility is going to be on the line based on who I refer people to, I’m going to have to make sure that they’re actually doing the things that I talk about in my videos, which is comprehensive best practices. And just to be clear, those best practices that I follow are the AAA best Practice guidelines. And yes, they’re from 2006, but I believe the core foundation of those best practices are still extremely relevant and I’m excitedly awaiting updates to those best practice guidelines. So I decided, and with a lot of help from other audiologists, we had Dr. Scott Frink, we had Dr. Abram Bailey, Dr. Amit Gosalia, and several other individuals. Dr. Mike Valente kind of collaborate with me on this to make sure that these checklists that I was putting out of these best practices were legit. And so I started the hearing up provider network at the end of 2019. And the goal of that was for me to be comfortable with the providers who are in the network that they’re actually following best practices. So we put them through a vetting process and they still have their own professional discretion inside of their own clinics. But it gave me a level of comfort that when I get hundreds of people, maybe even thousands of people reaching out a month trying to find a high quality hearing care professional, I can refer those people to or direct those people to a hearing up provider in their local area. So at least I’m comfortable that my reputation is going to be okay. Well, that’s quite a pedigree Cliff and I’m not sure that all of my colleagues actually understand that, which I think is something that we all need to know where all of us came from at one time or another, and because I think that adds to our discussion today as well. So, as a practice owner and the creator of Hearing Up Network and an influencer in hearing Care, you have some great clinicians that are part of this hearingloss.com program. Can you tell us a little bit about this joint venture that you’ve entered into with Audity, which should be quite an interesting concept for most of our colleagues? Yeah, I think that right off the bat. When this announcement came out, a lot of people were like, oh, Dr. Cliff joined Audigy. And I’m not an Audigy member myself, but I’ve had communications with Mason Walker at Audigy since like the what was this right before COVID basically. So it would have been the end of 2000 sorry, beginning of 2020, we started having conversations and the clinic that I went through in my fourth year externship was an Audigy clinic. So I had some understanding of what Audigy was, how they functioned, the value that they provided to their patients through the training that they offered. And that was the thing that really stood out to me, is that they actually care about patient experience inside of their clinics. They actually want the patient to have a good experience when they come into their clinics. And that resonated with me. I also had a chance to go to their provider boot camp, which took me from being a horrible provider. So I actually went through when I was an extern and there were months where I didn’t have a single person, a single patient accept treatment from me and I was like, well, what’s wrong with these patients? I must be getting the wrong patients. Well, it actually had a lot more to do with how I was consulting with these patients in a way that I felt was appropriate, wasn’t appropriate. And so that helped me out a lot. And so that kind of background understanding of Audigy made me at least initially comfortable with having some conversations. But if we look at my overall goal of making sure that patients have a good place to go to find a provider who’s going to be doing things the right way. Me doing a joint venture with Audigy, I felt that foundationally from a leadership perspective, from a membership perspective, that they had a lot of important things in place. That would just be a slight tweak with best practices from a clinical side, that would open up the availability of excellent providers to individuals who have hearing loss. So I want to be very clear here. I care more about the patients who have hearing loss. I want to make sure that they hear the best that they possibly can right below that. I care about our profession and the providers in it. And I believe that there’s a lot of providers out there who are doing things the right way. Consumers just have no clue who they are. So if we can start using this as a joint platform to start helping consumers and patients become aware of what best practices are and they have a place to actually go, I think it’s better for everybody. And you mentioned something about practitioners. I understand you kind of feel the future of audiology or private practice in particular is kind of in jeopardy. So can you give us an idea of maybe why that’s an opinion? So when you look at all of the aspects of our market and all the things that are changing inside of it right now, you have managed care, you have costco, you have over the counter hearing aids, you have just insurance in general. So you have a lot of these things that are kind of taking little pieces away of value out of what we provide as a profession. And if you look at any one of them individually, except for maybe manage. Or third party insurance companies. When you start looking at them individually, it’s like, well, any one of them is not a huge threat to our profession, but all of them kind of have the same value thing, which is the only value is in the device. And getting the device cost as low as humanly possible. And the hearing care professional is an optional thing. Now, I think that from an over the counter hearing aid standpoint, yes, I think we need these things. I think we need costco to serve a certain type of individual. I think we do need insurance coverage to help people with covering the cost of their hearing aids. But when you look at it all in totality, all it’s doing is eroding private practice audiology and you start having conversations with providers that are like, listen, I would love to provide best practices to my patient. I can’t afford to do it because the Reimbursement is not there for me to do it and I’m not even getting enough private pay patients to subsidize me taking care of these other individuals. So I think that there’s providers out there who are like, hey, I’m still crushing it inside of my clinic and that’s great, that will not last forever. This is going to continue to be a race to the bottom for a lot of clinics out there and there’s going to be a lot of clinics that ultimately at some point hit a breaking point where they’re no longer going to be able to be successful anymore. Well, I also think too, and you can put this out as well, this was on our list of discussions for today. But as these clinics are racing it to the bottom edge, you’re suggesting they need to expand into other components of practice other than just hearing aids. They need to get into hearing conservation, maybe forensics, maybe some other areas of practice to augment what they’re doing and then they can actually then offer the best practices to their patients as you have suggested. And I would agree with that to a degree, but I just want to add to that that I’m a strong believer in specialization so I tend to serve an underserved part of our community and anytime that I say that, everyone’s like, oh Cliff, that’s so nice of you. You serve low income individuals like, no, that’s not the demographic I serve. There are plenty of options for the low income individuals inside of this country. Do we need more? Probably yes. But I serve the individual who is looking for an absolute excellent experience and the best possible treatment outcome that they can get and those people do not know where to go. And if I end up venturing into just all these other different areas of audiology, it’s going to make the quality of the experience and the quality of care from an exceptional hearing aid treatment that is going to start to decline. So I don’t think that the full answer is like, okay, we’ll just become a jack of all trades, then. I think that there are individuals who need to specialize. I think that there are for patients who need their providers to specialize in this one thing. Because as you know, Bob. Hearing aids get more advanced and more complicated as time goes by. It takes me all of my free time to stay up to speed with what’s going on with all the new tech out there and be good at it at the same time. And if I try to get into vestibular, hearing conservation, all these other areas of audiology, my knowledge is going to suffer in that area. Okay, well, I think that’s a good argument for those things. Specialization the name of the game these days, and there will be those who specialize in vestibular who are going to do much with amplification. There’ll be those who want to go into forensics or area observation, some of the other areas as well. But maybe specialization in another area if there’s too much competition in your area, might be something of benefit, for sure. You pretty well discussed some of the practical challenges that practices face and I’ve always thought that some orientation to how to handle the challenges of competition is a real thing that we have to deal with virtually every day. And my guess is you’re probably using and your colleagues in the hearing about network and and so on are using best practices to offset some of the competitive things that are going on in their various communities. How do you take best practices and market that as a competitive advantage when everybody looks kind of the same to the average consumer? Yeah, it all really comes down to education. So when I first started my YouTube channel, I didn’t really know what was going to resonate with individuals who were watching the channel and what was going to lead them to be like, you know what, I think I need to go to a hearing care professional who does things the right way. I talk about quality of care a lot, but it’s very hard to articulate what quality of care is to someone who has no understanding of what hearing care is as an individual who has hearing loss. And I started testing a bunch of different messages and the one message that resonated was this idea of best practice audiologic care. And I believe the reason that it resonated is because there are things that are proven by research to result in better treatment outcomes. And so if you inform a consumer of what those things are and then say, hey, go to someone who does these things, they’re like, okay, well, the likelihood that you’re going to have a better treatment outcome is going to be much higher. And so that’s really kind of what started this whole aspect of talking about best practices. Best practices is not real or measurements right? Best practices is not test box measures. Best practices is not discussing assistive listening devices. Best practices is literally everything that goes into the things that you should be doing that research has shown us to. Be more effective in treating individuals hearing loss. And so when you disseminate this information in a way that a consumer can understand it, it is an extremely powerful message and it cuts through all the race to the bottom. Price is the only factor that people are looking at. Right. I want my patients to like me. I think person centered care is another great aspect of what you should be expecting when you go see a hearing. Are professional. Then I think that’s one big reason that I wanted to do a joint venture with Audigy on this. Because I think that this is something that Audigy members are excellent at because they get trained on it through Audigy. And I just think that if we can expand this message and kick start this message, it is going to be good for mainly the consumer who has hearing loss. And it’s also going to be good for the profession because these individuals who are starting to learn a different way to look at treating their hearing loss, it’s going to be a benefit to professionals who are willing to do things the right way. Yeah, you kind of talked about the best practices and the site a little bit, but there’s a whole lot of these hearing loss education sites out there. These people connect patients and providers and clinics and things like that. What’s hearingloss.com going to do differently than some of these other areas that are out, these other programs that are out there already? Yeah, we have specific requirements for the providers if they’re going to be getting the dual certification through hearingloss.com. Not only do you have to be following the patient best practices for patient experience inside of the clinic, and that’s going to be through the training that Audigy provides to members, but they also have to be following comprehensive audiologic best practices, which is basically everything that I’ve been talking about with my hearing up network for the past three plus years. And they actually go through a vetting process. And the nice thing about this process is that after they go through the vetting and we feel comfortable that, okay, you’ve committed to doing these things in your clinic. We’ve talked through the process of how you’re actually going to be doing it in your clinic, so we feel confident that you’re actually going to be doing them. The educated consumer comes in and has an understanding of what these things are. So it’s like this continuous, ongoing vetting process based on a better informed individual who is a patient. Now, again, there’s a lot of people who think, well, I’ve already Ashes certified and I’ve already AAA certified and I even hold the tinnitus certificate from AAA and I’ve got all these credential things, why do I need something else? And maybe you can kind of just hamper hold a few of the specific simply details of the certification from hearingloss.com that. Might enhance some of these other certifications that colleagues have. Yeah. So anytime even a patient tells me, so you’re telling me I need hearing aids. I’m like, well, you don’t need to do anything. Like you do what you feel like is in your best interest. I’m recommending that it is in your best interest to treat your hearing loss with hearing aids. But you’re usually a grown person who can make their own decisions. No one needs to have any kind of certification. There’s no necessary need for it. But what I will say and so I’m the Academy of Boards of Audiology certified So I’m ABA certified. I am not ASHA certified anymore. I was previously. But the thing that’s different about this particular certification is that it’s backed by reaching out to the consumer to help them understand the value of it. It actually has tangible value to them. It is not just slapping a few letters on the end of your name and expecting a consumer to be like, oh, good, board certified. That means something. It doesn’t mean anything. Everybody’s board certified in something. I think they’re doing some roof work on the building that I’m in right now. They’re probably board certified roofers up there. It really doesn’t hold as much meaning anymore unless you give it meaning to a consumer where they can actually understand the value that that adds. And so I tell people this all the time, is that when you become either in my network, the hearing up network, or you end up doing the hearing loss.com dual certification that really is to allow us to educate consumer like, hey, these are the particular professionals that you can go in and see. And here’s why. We believe that you’ll have a better experience when you go in to see them. I’ve never gotten anybody who scheduled an appointment with me. As much as I love our professional organizations, I’ve never had anyone call my clinic and say, hey, I saw your listing. I saw that you’re board certified on these websites. I trust you. You’re the person I’m going to go to. They don’t do that. But we have hundreds of referrals every month to hearing up providers at this point that they call them because like, hey, I saw that you’re part of the hearing up network, and I believe in what you’re doing. I want to come see you. Okay? And again, you’re totally correct about the idea that just because you have a bunch of letters after your name doesn’t necessarily mean that you provide the kinds of things that patients actually expect whenever they walk in clinic. And now the other one. How has this new certification program been received by the practices? It’s one thing to have a good program, but it’s something else to have it kind of accepted by colleagues that are interested by the service and receiving the certification. You know what? This is probably the thing I was most. impressed by with Audigy and their membership is that the vast majority of members that this has been presented to are fully on board with it. They are going through the process to make sure that they’re meeting all the best practice requirements. One of the things that a lot of clinicians either don’t have or don’t use regularly inside of their clinic is a test box. We need to be doing test box measures on every single hearing aid that comes into our clinic, whether it’s new or whether it’s repaired. And there’s an expense to that. I mean, depending on the test box that you go with, you’re talking thousands of dollars. And these providers are running out and grabbing multiple test boxes for their clinic. They’re getting all of their staff trained on it. They’re working it into their systems and processes so they make sure that it gets done. They’re hiring staff, additional audiology assistant staff, to actually conduct these measures. And honestly, I thought that it was going to be much slower of kind of a build up with my experience with hearingup.com. But honestly, once the providers understand what’s our goal here? Our goal here is to give a better experience, a better treatment outcome to patients, and at the same time, make sure that you still have a profession five to ten years from now. Because we’ve actually provided quality to patients instead of just like we talked about a little bit earlier, charging less and less and less and having this race to the bottom. Because the only way that you can show value is by charging less money. So I’m just really impressed with how the audity members have kind of like joined on with this, with this message because I think that they see what’s happening inside of the profession and they know that this is one of the only ways that we can have a profession going forward. And I know you’re kind of stickler on this best practices guideline kinds of things club. Since ASHA has these best practices and AAA has their best practice, ADA has theirs, why do we need more standards? We even have the APSO now that has all these standards. Why do we need more standards that we have already? Maybe we just need to enforce the ones we already have. Yeah. So enforcement is a big concern, like, who is enforcing these things? Nobody. No one’s come into my clinic and said, cliff, we want to review things, see what you’re doing here, go through some of your charts to make sure everything’s been done based off of what you signed when you became a member of AAA and stuff like that. Your typical practices and all these other along with these things, there’s also this concept of standards versus best practices. We don’t really have standards like they’re being developed. The Apso, I think, is going to be fantastic to at least have what the standards are. But then there’s also best practices. So the absolute best that you can possibly do. And so that’s why I really kind of grasped onto. This idea. And just to be clear, these are not my best practices that I talk about all the time. Even if you’re not wanting to join any of the network that I have or hearing loss.com and become part of this juggernaut that we’re building for the profession, get yourself print off. I don’t care what it is. If it’s the AAA guidelines, if it’s the Asha guidelines, if it’s the ADA guidelines, print them off and follow them and start giving your patients a good experience and make them know that you’re following best practices. The term best practices, since I’ve been talking about it so much, is becoming a pretty familiar term inside of the consumer world of individuals with hearing loss. So benefit off of the work that we’re doing, even if you don’t want to join us. One of our kind of … What do you hope is going to come out of the hearing loss.com venture, where you’ve taken your hard work online and your hard work of building your network and finding that with the audigy people to facilitate this hearing loss.com, what do you hope is really going to come out of that? I think it’s going to accelerate the messaging that we have around best practices about quality of care. I think that it is going to allow me to put more time into content creation rather than administrative, because Audigy has a lot of administrative help there, which will help out a lot and really just kind of jumpstart this whole thing. HearingUP has kind of been a side project of mine since 2019. I’m still in the clinic every week. I’m still creating a variety of hearing aid review videos, other additional content for individuals with hearing loss. I have a podcast show that I do during the week, so there’s a lot of things that I want to do, and I think that it is a disservice to individuals with hearing loss for me not to partner with organizations that can help accelerate what I’ve been trying to do for individuals with hearing loss. And I think that of all of the companies that I could have done a joint venture with, audigy was the one who was most in alignment with what my vision was. And it’s not been an easy transition, but everyone’s working hard to make sure that this joint venture serves everybody. And it’s not just about me. It’s not just about Audigy. It’s mostly about the patients. And it’s about how we as a profession can come together, even if we don’t agree on every single thing, but do something that’s good for our profession and for the patients. And it is refreshing for the old guys to talk with the young guys and see the enthusiasm and the vision that our young professionals have and spend my pleasure to work with Dr. Olson – AKA Dr. Cliff here in this kind of an interview because it gives all of us that have been around a while a perspective as to how the future of our profession is going to go. So I want to thank you so much for being with us today, Cliff, and giving us your perspective on the future of audiology by this joint venture that you entered into. hearingloss.com with hearing up and Audigy. Thanks again for being with us. Thank you so much, Bob. It’s been a pleasure. Hopefully we can do this again and I hope that you’ll be with us very soon for another venture and another discussion at this week in Hearing.