The business of audiology isn’t a cakewalk. To maintain a healthy audiology practice, you have to keep your current patients engaged and maintain a consistent flow of new customers, all while providing expert medical advice. And, sometimes, the traditional practice revenue model makes it harder than it needs to be to grow.

Today’s hearing health care model provides excellent care for patients with moderate to severe hearing loss. But many modern audiology practices miss out on the new business they could gain by taking a purely patient-driven approach, in which you choose treatment based solely on your expertise as an audiologist.

That may seem like the obvious choice for the best care possible but, as it stands, audiologists often feel compelled to grow their practices through outdated procedures that ignore the nuances of hearing health care. That’s why Tuned was created: to give both audiologists and patients a new option for their care.

With Tuned, audiologists connect directly to patients through tele-audiology and have the option to offer products for a variety of hearing profiles. There’s never been a better time to take matters into your own hands as an audiologist to grow your practice.

Here are three things you should stop doing if you want to grow your audiology practice:

  • Prioritizing Devices Over Expertise

Audiologists are highly trained health care professionals with licenses and accreditations who maintain standards of top care and accountability for their patients. Too often, their expertise takes a back seat to growing profits through device sales. But the actual products people want are the experience and recommendations of audiologists within a practice — not the devices it can provide.

All the value a patient can receive at an audiology practice is just a result of that knowledge. Too many practices focus on selling devices to their patients. But that’s not why you became an audiologist. You’re here because you want to help people, and emphasizing your desire to care — along with your competence and accountability — can make your practice stand out, with a little help from Tuned.

  • Focusing on Patients With Severe Hearing Loss

With so many audiology practices emphasizing hearing aids instead of expertise, modern audiology tends to focus on treating severe hearing loss. After all, if all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

Audiologists who want to grow their practice can start seeing more patients with mild, or even hidden, hearing loss, a patient category that has long been underserved. Hidden hearing loss, specifically, has only been recently deemed an auditory disorder, and many patients being treated for it now would have been turned away in the past as it’s nearly impossible to detect with traditional hearing tests.

Audiologists can also recommend solutions for people with different hearing profiles through the Tuned marketplace, where they can find devices that assist with better hearing everything from work calls to the big game on TV. Moreover, if the audiologist doesn’t want to recommend a device, there’s no commission requirement.

  • Practice Decisions Based on Insurance Reimbursement

Tuned was created to forge a new kind of relationship between audiologists and their patients. That’s why the self-pay platform doesn’t rely on insurance to call the shots when it comes to patient care. Patients pay a flat fee for each consultation, and then make their own decisions on device purchases.

The founders of Tuned realized that insurance coverage is often geared towards the reactive, legacy model: it is often limited in scope and only related to major, big-ticket interventions for patients with severe hearing issues. But there are so many more patients with treatable hearing conditions such as tinnitus. On Tuned, you don’t have to worry about insurance status as a barrier to care for these patients.

Tuned offers audiologists looking to grow their practices an alternative to the traditional audiology practice model to help a more diverse set of patients care for their hearing health. You have access to any patient in the state you are licensed in through telehealth services and convenient tools like Tuniversity to better understand cutting-edge options for your patient’s unique hearing health care needs.

What’s stopping you? Sign up today and start using the Tuned platform to maximize growth for your audiology practice.

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