- Hey, guys. Welcome back to the DrClifAuD vlog.
This is vlog number 39.
And today, I'm going to talk to you about a conference
that I just got back from in Denver, Colorado
called the AudBoss conference.
Now, to give you a little bit of understanding
of what the AudBoss conference is,
it's basically for audiology clinics,
business practice owners, hearing instrument specialists,
and audiologists alike.
And the whole purpose of the conference
is to help private practice owners network with each other
and to help them do things better.
To help hem grow their practices,
but grow their practices in a way
that's being done through providing better quality of care,
better service, better education, and things like that.
Now, before you destroy me in the comment section,
let me clarify here that this conference
was not a traditional conference.
Because of COVID-19 going on,
the vast majority of the attendees
of this conference were virtual.
So the individuals who actually showed up,
there was probably about 70 of us out of about 250
that would have went to the in-person conference.
And really, the entire time we were there,
the whole theme of everything was staying protected.
So you had to wear a mask virtually at all times,
except for when I was up on stage talking
and when I was eating and drinking.
Other than that,
you were pretty much masked the entire time.
Not only that, but when presentations were being given,
every person in attendance
was spaced out ridiculously far away,
so you really couldn't even lean over
and chat to anybody when there was a presentation going on
or anything like that.
You were just too far away from anybody.
Giving the presentation was much nicer to be up on stage
and having people in attendance,
but it was a pretty sparse crowd
compared to what I'm typically used to
when giving a talk at these different conferences.
Now this is the second time that I've presented
at the AudBoss conference.
It's actually the second year that it's been held.
It's put on by Dr. Amit Gosalia,
April Royan, and her husband, Mark Royan.
And I really like this conference.
This is a conference where you can go
and actually talk with people
who are kind of in the same shoes that you are
because they also run a private practice
or multiple private practices.
And when I first went there last year to give my talk,
that one was in Naples, Florida, and the primary goal
of when I went there was to recruit individuals
to join the Dr. Cliff Approved Provider Network.
If you're unfamiliar with what my network is,
it's basically a network of hearing care professionals
who are committed to following best practices
to make sure that they're providing you
with the highest possible level of care
by following all of the best practices
that we have inside of our industry
to optimize your performance with hearing treatment.
And so, when I gave that talk, it was very successful
in the sense that a lot of hearing care providers signed up
and went through the vetting process for me to verify
that they actually do follow best practices.
And so they fortunately invited me back this year
to give another talk.
I wouldn't say that my goal this year
was to necessarily recruit for the network.
I just wanted to give people value,
and so, when I went this year, my primary goal
was to educate other private practice owners
how to provide a higher amount of value
from the services that they provide.
Any time that you ask somebody like,
"Well, what's the difference between you and somebody else?"
and everybody is always like, "Oh, well the service,
the service, we do better service than everybody,"
but there's no tangible aspect to that.
So I wanted to promote the use of best practices,
but not just doing them, doing them in a way
that shows you, the individual who's wearing hearing aids,
that those best practices provide an immense amount of value
so you can properly understand
what's happening with your treatment.
I tell this to my patients all the time.
I want them to have at least a foundational understanding
of what I'm trying to accomplish
so they can do better with their hearing treatment.
Any time that you know what's going on,
it helps you better articulate if things are going wrong.
It helps you just to be more happy in general knowing
that you're maximizing your performance
with hearing treatment.
And I would say that it was really well received,
at least from the small group of individuals
that was actually in attendance.
Of course, there was a lot of individuals taking,
a lot of hearing care professionals taking the virtual,
so they recorded it
and then put it up on the virtual platform.
So those Aud bosses could actually watch
the virtual version of my talk.
Of course, I can't get feedback directly from them,
but they're able to watch the talk
and hopefully they got a lot of value out of it as well.
But I also wanna talk about some of the key takeaways
that I got from actually being in attendance
and listening to the speakers who they invited.
One of the themes was communicating better
with our patients, not just when there are patients
but communicating before you're our patient.
Everybody goes through a timeline
of when they start to notice their hearing loss,
when they actually decide
that they wanna do some research on their hearing loss,
and then ultimately scheduling an appointment
and then really deciding to actually treat
their hearing loss oftentimes with hearing aids.
I think that a lot of hearing care private practice owners,
they focus only on, "Okay, I wanna get this person
into my office so we can actually treat them."
So they only really look at the spectrum of when
that person's ready to actually treat their hearing loss
but we need to do a better job
of communicating expectations,
what options are available, different things like that,
to our patients before there our patients.
And I'm talking years before they our patients,
providing them with education
and just staying in touch with them.
It's really, it's a mindset shift
in terms of how we would market essentially.
And not necessarily market for the goal of like,
"You know what, save $200 on a pair of hearing aids
and get in the door right now."
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about providing you with value
before you were even in the consideration phase
of coming into a clinic,
and then taking that information
that we provide you in that time
and then staying in touch with you.
So if you end up requesting some more information,
not just giving you our phone number
where you can call and schedule an appointment
but actually giving you information
and then repeatedly giving you information
in a reasonable timeframe for maybe a couple of years
before you ultimately decide to come into the clinic.
Now, another one that really struck me
from the presentations at AudBoss this year
was this idea of philanthropy, so giving back.
And this is something that I don't think
that I do a good job of.
I don't have anything set up
to serve underprivileged communities,
serve any individuals with hearing loss
who can't afford hearing treatment.
I oftentimes refer those individuals out
to receive treatment in other means,
and there are other charitable organizations
that can give to individuals
who do not have the financial means
or who have unique circumstances
that I can't serve inside of my clinic.
So I think I need to start doing a better job
of thinking what I can do to give back a little bit more.
Yes, my video content does give education.
I mean, I don't ask you for anything with that.
I don't even monetize my channel in the sense
that you have to sit through a bunch of dumb commercials
on YouTube before you can get to my video content.
But that's completely different than actually taking action
and helping someone hear better
even if they can't afford to.
So that was something that really stuck out to me.
There are some amazing...
In fact, when they asked for a raise of hands
of who's actually gone on mission trips
to fit underserved communities
and countries with hearing aids,
about half the room that we were in
had actually been on a mission trip.
And not only do mission trips take time away
from the clinic,
so take time away from serving their own patients
inside of their clinic and making money, earning a living,
but you actually have do pay money
to go on the mission trip
to give away your your time and your talents
to help underprivileged individuals hear better.
It's not a thing where it's paid for by anyone else
by donations or anything like that.
You're footing your own bill when you go
and you do these mission trips
as a hearing care professional.
But to see how many people have actually done that,
and the fact that I have not done really,
anything to give back makes me think that
that's a goal that I need to create here into the future.
One of the other aspects was communicating better.
Again, it's a lot about communication, what we do,
but communicating better with primary care physicians.
So there's this concept of physician marketing
that's basically any type of medical profession
or ancillary profession to the medical profession does.
They go into these doctor's offices,
they try to educate them on the importance
of treating hearing loss, so on so forth.
But communicating better with them
and helping them understand
that hearing loss is an epidemic.
I mean, there are so many people with hearing loss
that need help and making sure
that our primary care physicians are fully aware
of what to do with these patients,
and where to send them, and what to recommend,
that's a big deal.
And if we don't do a good job
of helping primary care physicians understand
what they should be doing
from a screening component for hearing loss,
or where they should be sending patients
who have hearing loss, that's a problem.
So we need to make sure that we properly educate physicians
on the importance of hearing healthcare.
And that spills over into the cognitive side of things.
One of probably the most impressive things I saw
in terms of different things
that you could incorporate inside of your clinic
was cognitive testing.
We all know the correlation between hearing loss
and dementia at this point,
but there's really no good tools out there.
I mean, inside of my clinic,
if there's a question of cognitive decline,
the Mini-Cog, which is a screening tool
that's something that we administer inside of the office.
But it's something that's few and far between,
but we're not doing anything to regularly screen
or get a baseline of cognitive function
for a lot of our patients.
And there is a program out there now
that just got released called Cognivue that I ran through.
And it is a pretty impressive system
to where everybody would come in gets cognitively tested,
which has a direct impact on someone's ability
to function with hearing aids
and process information that they're hearing.
So I think that that's something
that will probably be incorporated
inside of my clinic here in the near future.
And the other thing that I think was a pretty big theme
other than just the overall growing your practice
through quality of what you provide to your patients.
It was not discussion of trying to make your stuff cheaper
so you can sell it to more people,
or "How can we trick more people to come in to our clinic
so we can sell them something?"
that wasn't the theme of this.
The theme is constantly,
and this is why I love this group so much,
it's all about what can we do better
to serve our patients which in turn will help us grow
so we can serve more patients, right?
Every single person there, I think, has the same goal
of really helping as many people as possible and doing it
through a means of providing a better quality of care.
And that's what we were all there for,
and that's why I identify so well with this group.
But the stresses that come along with doing that
also require us to have a little bit of focus
on our own wellbeing from a mental health perspective.
I can tell you this firsthand
from a daily grind perspective of working in the clinic,
seeing patients the majority of the day,
having a whole bunch of different administrative stuff
that has to be done in order to allow that to happen,
as well as creating video contents the rest of my free time,
that has a lot of stress that's associated with it.
And so doing things
that can make us a little bit more mindful
and give us back some mental clarity and mental health,
I think is good.
So taking time to basically take care of ourselves
because we're only really good at serving our patients
if we've served ourselves as well
and making sure that we're on the right track
from a mental perspective.
'Cause it's very hard to help someone else
when you can't help yourself.
So I think that in general, this was really refreshing.
It was nice to get out during this COVID pandemic.
Of course, there was always that little bit of fear
that, "Oh, man, is this really a smart thing to do?"
I know there's gonna be those of you out there who's like,
"It was dumb. It wasn't worth going."
And I can see that perspective,
but I can also see the other perspective too,
that kind of being trapped away for months and months
at this point isn't healthy either from a mental standpoint.
So it was definitely nice to get out and interact,
even though it wasn't the type of interaction
that I'm used to with really close proximity,
with a lot of people,
not having to wear a mask and all of that.
The funny thing was that a lot of the individuals
that I know and know well, I couldn't even recognize them
'cause I couldn't see their entire face.
You can only see their eyes, which is crazy.
'Cause anytime that you see them,
you always see either on Facebook or in person,
you can see their whole face.
So that was kind of an interesting dynamic this time around,
but it was definitely a really good time.
I had a great time catching up with a lot of friends
that I've had and have developed inside of this profession.
And I look forward to going back next year as well.
So that is it for today's vlog.
I hope you guys liked it.
Thanks for listening to my ramblings
of what's going on in my life.
I really enjoyed this last week.
But as always, I'll see you guys next week.
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