- Hey guys, welcome back to the Dr. Cliff AUD vlog.
This is vlog number 104.
And today I need to clarify something for you,
but before I clarify that,
just go ahead and hit that like button for me really quick.
There you go. I appreciate it.
It really helps out the channel.
Okay, so the thing that I wanna clarify in this video
is this whole aspect of me not accepting patients anymore.
Now I published a vlog,
I don't know how many weeks back,
where I said that, you know,
we're no longer accepting patients,
but if you actually watched the vlog,
you would have understood
that it's not that we're not accepting
any new patients right now.
It's that at some point in the future
I won't be accepting new patients,
or at least I'll be restricting it significantly.
So let me kind of explain that here a little bit.
Really, first of all,
with the aspect of why I'm bringing it back up now
is I've had a number of patients come in
and be like, oh, you know,
I know that you're not accepting any new patients anymore,
but, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, whoa, hold on.
Like, I'm still accepting patients right now.
It's just at some point in the future,
I'm gonna be, you know,
not having enough time to see new patients in the clinic.
So, it kind of made me wonder like,
man, should I take down that video?
Is it giving the wrong message?
And to be honest with you,
yes, it is giving the wrong message to some individuals.
But I wanna clarify this
is that I am still accepting new patients.
I just know that at some point,
I'm gonna get so busy with the amount of patients
that I have and the amount of followup care
that I'm committing to with my patients,
because the way that my practice works
is that we put a lot of effort,
not just into the initial fitting and programming
of hearing aids,
but the long-term care of patients
when they're using their hearing aids,
because there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen
ongoing from, you know, the care and maintenance
side of things to running diagnostic tests
on the hearing aids,
to conducting further hearing tests
to adjust the prescription.
And then we have to reprogram hearing aids, so on, so forth.
And then, you know, ultimately it gets to the point
where an individual will need new hearing aids.
And then we have to repeat the fitting process
and all of that all over again.
So, it's just the way that my clinic is set up
is that it is not very driven
by just having new patients come in,
us fitting them really quick,
getting them out the door
and hoping that they don't come back
until they need their next set of hearing aids.
And so that kind of leads me into,
really, what I wanna talk about here
is I'm really excited
that we just offered a new audiologist to come in
to the clinic, or another new audiologist
to come in to the clinic and they accepted.
So, I'm like really psyched about this
because here's the thing.
As the years go by and my time
becomes more and more limited,
I run into this issue that I'm not gonna be able to help
as many people here is I ultimately would want to,
or, you know, I'm not able to actually, you know,
fulfill my mission of improving people's hearing
to the fullest extent of what I wanna accomplish
throughout my career.
And so really the only way for me to do this
is to leverage my beliefs of how to treat hearing loss
with having other providers come in
and follow the same structure that I do
inside of the clinic.
So, the number one requirement that I have
anytime I bring an audiologist onto my staff
is are they purpose driven?
Are they someone who truly just is passionate
about helping individuals hear better?
And who wants to do the right thing
for a patient at all times,
because, you know,
I could very easily inside of my clinic
with the amount of attention that we get online,
I could very easily cheapen the quality of care
that we give patients and still probably have them
be happy enough to spend the amount of money
that we charge inside of the clinic,
and have them keep coming back,
and just coming back significantly less
than what they currently do.
But from a moral standpoint, from an ethical standpoint,
I don't feel that that's right,
because I'm super committed to following best practices.
Now, you guys have heard me
talk about best practices ad nauseum at this point.
But the point being here is that we follow
a very strict structure in terms of how we onboard patients
and in terms of how we take care of them long-term.
And so I believe that as long as I have an audiologist
who's passionate about providing
a really high-quality of care and really, you know,
outstanding experience to the patients that we have,
that I'm gonna be able to kind of replicate
what I'm doing with my patients, all right?
You know, when you start looking at it, I mean,
when I bring on a new patient,
they're typically waiting several weeks
before they can even get in to see me initially.
And then it's another several weeks
before I can actually start their fitting sequence
that we do.
You know, their best practice fitting sequence
that takes six weeks for me to complete.
And then I'm seeing that patient once every quarter,
so every three months, in that first year,
I'm seeing my patients for an hour a piece,
or sorry, for a half hour for some of those visits,
and then the annual is an hour
for us to re-complete testing and all that.
And so you can see how my time is extremely limited.
So, unless I'm willing to bring someone on
and teach them the way that I do things,
we're gonna get to the point
where we're just not accepting new patients at all
inside of the clinic.
And for those of you who've kind of seen
my clinic tour, like my walkthrough of my clinic, video,
you know that we have three treatment rooms
inside of our clinic and, you know, I'm using one of them.
Dr. Altus, who's fantastic, by the way,
he's using one of them.
And so we have a third room
that is essentially not being used at all.
And so now is that time
to put a provider inside of that office,
so we can continually serve patients who want come
and be served at our clinic.
And, you know, the demand is there.
I mean, there is no shortage of individuals
who want to make sure that their hearing loss
is treated the right way.
The only limitation is the amount of time
that me and Dr. Altus currently have.
So, super excited to bring on this new audiologist.
Essentially they start February 11th of 2022,
and there's gonna be a pretty extensive training process
with this individual.
I'm really happy to be bringing in this new audiologist
and for them to be really open
about what they want to achieve in their career.
I mean, the audiologist that I just hired,
she's coming from a clinic
that did not follow best practices.
And the thing is, is that it's always telling.
When they come in and they have an interview
and they say that they feel like, you know,
they've sold their soul.
And the problem is that there's not that many clinics
out there who follow like,
comprehensive best practice care
and who give you enough time
to really work with the patients
and to make sure that you're performing
auditory rehabilitation and that you're following
best practices to make sure that you're optimizing
the performance of your patients.
So here, early on in this year,
I'm gonna be spending a lot of time doing, you know,
training and development for the providers on my staff.
And it takes a lot of time to make sure
that we're all kind of, you know, seeing things
the same way.
I mean, not seeing things the same way.
So that's one of the nice things
about being an audiologist
is that there's some individual discretion
when it comes to treating a hearing loss, but in general,
when we can get together and have what we call grand rounds,
so we take certain cases and discuss them with each other,
I think the more audiologists that you have on staff,
the better that you all become
because it brings in
all these different treatment perspectives and experiences
of different providers in order to take that knowledge
and use it for maybe a different patient
to enhance their treatment as well.
Now, all of that stuff is great,
but really, the main goal here is that we wanna make sure
that our clinic is operating at full of capacity
as we possibly can,
because when we're operating at full capacity,
it means that we are treating as much hearing loss
as humanly possible.
And, you know, I truly believe that,
you know, our clinic is doing things the right way
when it comes to a treatment perspective.
Now I can't speak for other clinics in totality.
I know that there are other fantastic clinics out there,
but I know the bar that I have set inside of my clinic,
and as long as I can encourage my other providers
to meet that bar,
a lot of individuals are gonna have massive success
with hearing treatment.
And that's the thing that excites me.
Essentially what we're doing here is, you know,
I don't think, my wife would disagree,
Ashley would disagree with me,
but I don't think that there's anything inherently special
about me other than my passion for treating hearing loss
and my dedication to just following best practices
to optimize treatment outcomes,
and doing it in a way
that is a person-centered care approach,
meaning that there's a lot of interaction with my patients
to make sure that they understand what's going on.
And so they're actually participating
in their own treatment.
But to be able to, you know, kind of, you know,
take the things that I do
and share them with a different provider
so that other provider can be special in their own way
and do an exceptional job of treating hearing loss as well,
I think that's the thing that gets me really excited
because I know here that in the next year or two,
my schedule is gonna be so filled
to where I'm probably going to,
if not stop accepting patients,
at least significantly reduce the amount of new patients
that I see so I can continue to serve
my existing patient base.
So, you know, this comes across as me being salesy,
which I hate to do,
but if you're considering getting treated by me,
it would be a really good idea for you to consider
starting your treatment within the next,
you know, 12 months or so,
because I just have a feeling that, you know,
after 12 months from now, it's a huge question mark
as to whether I'll be bringing on
a significant amount of new patients,
so I can continue to serve my existing patient base.
But don't worry because, you know,
there are still other providers in my office
that do not have completely filled schedules.
We have this new audiologist coming on
who's going to have essentially a clean slate
and we're gonna start, you know,
putting individuals on her schedule as well.
And it's going to be to where
it's gonna probably take a couple of years
before we get that individual's schedule filled up.
So, you know, you're still sitting in a pretty good position
if you wanna get treated at my clinic
for your hearing loss and to have best practices followed
when you're getting your treatment.
But, you know, I just wanted to really kind of clarify that
for everyone because, you know, by no means,
am I losing my passion for what I'm doing.
By no means am I done taking patients right now.
By no means am I going to just kind of pawn everybody off
on different providers,
even though that is part of the strategy going here,
going forward, is that individuals
who are comfortable seeing another provider,
they will have the opportunity to see that provider as well.
But, you know, I think that any time
that a business gets really big,
especially a family-owned business,
burnout is a real big concern.
And so, you know, myself, I know that, you know,
when I go and I'm in the office for, you know,
11 hours a day or more,
I can see how that if I were to do that
for another 30 years,
that I would reach massive levels of burnout
and probably lose my passion for what I'm doing.
And I don't wanna do that.
And then, you know, on top of that,
I get done at work and I come straight home,
eat dinner, maybe exercise, workout, you know,
and I end up starting to go back to working
on editing video content, scripting video content,
researching for video content, creating video content.
Like, all of it.
I mean, it's essentially it's a never ending thing
that I've been doing since 2017.
And while I love the patient care aspect,
that takes a considerable amount of my time.
And I know that I'm gonna have to back away
from seeing as many patients as possible.
That came out wrong.
I know I'm gonna have to back away
from trying to maximize the amount of patients
that I see over the course of a week.
I think it's gonna be realistic
that I'm gonna end up seeing patients
about three days a week,
and so I can have four days a week to work on, you know,
content creation,
and then maybe having like a day off.
Having a day off would be nice.
I forget what that's kind of like.
I get a day off here and there
if there's like a holiday or something like that,
but I never stop thinking about it.
You know, I'm always thinking about like,
what else could I create that would provide value
to someone who has hearing loss?
And it just, it never stops.
As soon as I hit the stop button on this camera
and I go in to, and finish editing this vlog for you guys,
I'm gonna be thinking of the next thing.
Like what else can I do to create value?
So, the hamster never gets off the wheel,
so to speak, up here in my head.
So, that's really what we wanted to share
with you guys today.
I have a new provider coming in, super excited.
Passionate provider coming in.
Dr. Altus, passionate about treating hearing loss.
Couldn't be happier to have him on my team
for the last, what, year and a half at this point,
and going strong.
If you live in the Phoenix area
and you want your hearing loss treated, I don't think,
you know, I'm not even gonna say it.
You go where you feel like you need to go
where you would get the best care possible
from a hearing treatment perspective.
If that's in my clinic, great.
But if you've seen other videos on my channel,
you know that I am more than happy for you
to go to another clinic,
as long as you uphold them to a really high standard
when it comes to treating your hearing loss,
because you are worth it.
Your hearing loss is worth it to make sure
that everything's done the best way humanly possible.
So, that is it for this week's vlog, guys.
Thank you for listening to me rant for the last,
I don't know, 10, 15, 20 minutes at this point.
And as always, I'll see you next week.
(upbeat music)