Welcome, everyone, to the webinar, Five Principles to Amplification Success, Patient Retention and Referrals. We're so glad that you could be here today to learn more about patient retention techniques in building a strong referral network. Your moderators for today are me, Ted Annis, Senior Marketing Specialist, and Carrie Peterson, Member Services Supervisor. Our expert presenter today is Ted Blanford. Ted has 17 years of fitting experience with several regional and national hearing aid dispensers and manufacturers. Ted is a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Army and is a retired Master Sergeant. He's blended his unique understanding of patient care and military experience to dive deep into the psychology dynamic of the patient, family, and practitioner relationship. We're very excited to have Ted as our presenter today, but before we get started, we have just a few housekeeping items. Please note that we're recording today's presentation so that we may offer it on demand through the IHS website in the future. This webinar is available for one continuing education credit through the International Hearing Society and the Association of Hearing Instrument Practitioners of Ontario. We've uploaded the CE quiz to the handouts section of the webinar dashboard, and you may download it at any time. You can also find out more about receiving continuing education credit on our website at IHSinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner on the homepage or choose webinars from the navigation menu. You'll find the CE quiz along with information on how to submit your quiz to IHS for credit. If you'd like a copy of the slideshow from today's presentation, you can download it from the handouts section of the webinar dashboard or access it from the webinar page on the IHS website. Feel free to download the slides now. Tomorrow, you will receive an email with a link to a survey on this webinar. It is brief and it will help us create valuable content for you moving forward. Today, we'll be covering the following topics, solidifying trust and building strong relationships through respect and ongoing counseling, creating relationships that promote and ensure patient retention, cultivating and retaining relationships that translate into willing and active referral sources, and making the practice stand out from the retail selling model in big box stores. At the end, we'll move on to a Q&A session. You can send us a question for Ted at any time by entering your question in the question box on your webinar dashboard, usually located to the right of your webinar screen. We'll take as many questions as we can in the time we have available. Now I'm going to turn things over to Ted, who will guide you through today's presentation. Take it away, Ted. Thank you, Ted. Thank you, Kari. We appreciate that very much. Thank you, everyone, for attending and taking valuable time out of your day. I'm very confident that you'll find something that's very motivational and practical for your practice as well. The five principles of success, amplification of success, is an ongoing counseling technique that allows us to be able to build strong and deep relationships with our patients so we can create a loyal patient base and also allow them to feel comfortable and come to their own conclusions for referrals and also upgrading when the need arises. This concept, obviously, is something that we've been working on in our entire careers as hearing instrument specialists and dispensers or audiologists, dispensing audiologists. I found a way to put it into a program that will allow us to really dive deep into the psychology and the emotional concept of the hearing loss in the patient. The principles are – the five principles may not be applied in each and every appointment because it's used in a way to identify the need of the patient as you work with them on that moment and it's expanded upon individually. The concept that I want to really go through is something that we've talked about for several years now but really haven't put in practice on a wide scale industry-wide is working with the brain and how the brain works with hearing. I want to say that we are starting with the ears. We're not ending with the ears. After we fit the hearing instruments, working with the brain and working with psychology and working with the counseling with the patients, that's really where we start to see our success in this program. What we're really trying to do is we're trying to reprogram the ears – I'm sorry, reprogramming the brain to a better hearing experience because of decades-old programming of the brain that says that their hearing loss is normal and it takes time to make sure that we do that correctly. The concept is five specific principles. When I say principles, I mean them as positions or people or things. Number one, the patient. Number two, the loved ones or what we call in the past third party. I want to call it the loved one response or the support system because our hearing loss does not just affect the person with the hearing, it affects everyone that loves them. Principle number three, the practitioner and the staff. Number four is the hearing device. It's the right tool for the right job and knowing how to use it properly. We're going to be reiterating that particular concept quite often throughout the webinar. Of course, number five is time and the brain. Each of the three, the first three principles, the patient, the support system and the practitioner and their staff have four specific subcategories that are the real tools that we want to work with in each and every one of our appointments or visits with our patients. We want to go over the physical portion of the hearing experience, the mental and the attitude portion of the hearing experience when we're talking about learning and understanding psychology, what are their personal perceptions or social perceptions, their physical perceptions and inward and outward struggles. It all comes down to trust. And of course, emotional. Emotions with hearing are very, very close so we'll go through the grieving process and explaining those things with our patients so they can start to understand why they're so attached. Understanding the relationship of how our brain and our ears work together is critical. Dr. Anu Shamra, PhD, out of University of Colorado, Boulder, has several wonderful articles out about cognitive reorganization and even in the hearing review there's an article about this as well because the brain changes with the hearing loss. It literally reorganizes and it uses specific sections of our brain to help us hear and understand, takes away from those sections that are supposed to be used for something else, such as your eyesight. We all know this with our lip reading or face reading, but also the executive functions of our frontal cortex. They're shown to be affected by hearing loss as well. Thus, when we talk about our patients that are older that already have some decision issues or their frontal cortex and their executive portion of their brain is not working as total function with dementia or Alzheimer's or just the fact that they're getting aged and when you start taking away the energy from that area to help us hear, it's even worse. Please know the difference between hearing and understanding as well, being able to explain that to our patients in a way that they can get it, that louder is not better, better is better. Just hearing is incomplete. It's the ability to respond to sound and volume and it has very little to do with clarity. Clarity and understanding is the ability to process the complete sound to the body's best ability and remember those last four words, to the body's ability, not to the hearing instrument's ability, but to the body's ability and we want to make sure that the patients understand that just by turning up the TV, they get confused why everything is still mumbly or when someone yells at them and they still can't understand what's being said. Like my grandmother said, you can't yell at someone and say I love you and look like you mean it. Let's talk about principle number one, the patient. The patient is what we've been focusing on for such a long time that we pretty much forget whoever else is in the room with us or maybe not even have someone in the room with us, but we have to find out what their needs are and let's go through the four subcategories for the patient themselves. Are we fitting them right? Is our testing complete through audiometry? The style and sound of the hearing instruments, are they comfortable with that? Do they understand that the decades of programming their brain is giving them memories of sound, not necessarily what sound is supposed to sound like and are they comfortable with those things? Can they use their hands properly to be able to insert and then extract the hearing instruments themselves and are they able to get benefit from the prescriptive correction, the solution that we're suggesting? How is their attitude? Are they mentally understanding why their hearing loss is happening? What's going on with their hearing loss? Why is it that they hear but they can't understand or do they understand the consequences of uncorrected hearing loss and do they more importantly understand the benefits of having clarity back in their lives? We really have to work with each individual patient and get deep into their understanding and their attitude about what hearing loss is, what it means to them and what their goals are if they even understand what the benefits can be. Psychologically, we can work through the stages of grief but they don't cover everything. We want to find out what their personal perceptions are. I think we've all experienced where a patient will come in or a prospective patient will come in and they know they have a hearing loss. Their spouse knows they have a hearing loss. We know they have a hearing loss. We show them that they can be helped and they still do nothing. That is frustrating. Why do they do that? The simple thing is their personal perceptions of who we are or what we are as an industry is stronger than our ability to gain their trust in a short period of time to show them that we really care and we can help them with a positive solution. We want to know what those perceptions are by asking them questions, engaging the patient. Social perceptions. They know someone that has a hearing instrument that is inside of a sock drawer or they know someone that has it on the coffee table or they only wear it for church. They know what their perception of that socially is about those folks and they bring that with them and we need to get that turned around and bring it into a positive light. And their physical perception. We have all heard it before. I don't want the big honking hearing aid or the hearing aid that whistles all the time or this and that. Most of our patients are not educated on what our technology can do and what it looks like. So we need to work with them as well. They have inward and outward struggles because of their perceptions in the past. Who they have socialized with and who they understand that has had a hearing instrument before or they struggle with the idea of a hearing loss itself. By counseling with them consistently, we're able to be an advocate for them to find their way out of that darkness. And the best place to move forward into the grief process is through counseling emotions. And it will also support a lot of those perceptions. We have to find out where they are in that process of grief and most of the time it's in denial or it's in anger or depression. We want to work them through. If we can get them into bargaining and understanding that portion and then go straight into the idea of acceptance, that's what we really need them to be. And it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to move forward with the counseling until we can get them to really understand and accept the fact of their hearing loss. Principle number two is a loved one. And as you see, they also have the four subcategories that we're working with. And in the past we've used the third party. We've all heard the statistic that you have an 85% better chance of selling a hearing aid if you have their spouse with them. Well, I want to change that concept a little bit and take you away from a leverage point of view. I want to bring the entire team on the same battlefield going towards the same objective and continuing the mission together as a team. And in order to do that, we have to understand where that loved one is coming from, how the hearing loss is affecting them, how it is making their life different, and what they would do differently if they had a better communication with the person they love. They take on the caretaker's role from the physical point of view. They are the ones that are running blocking, and they're the ones that are answering for them. They're changing their physical movements and their physical habits to accommodate for a hearing loss. And that goes into their attitude towards their hearing loss, and they are really educated by the folks that give them the negative feedback in the world around them, just like anyone else where they say, well, I know someone that has a hearing aid, and they tried it and it failed. So their attitude towards hearing instruments may or may not be something that we need to work on exactly into the positive. And a lot of times the spouses come on board by saying, yes, I really want them to get help, if it will work. And counseling one-on-one with the second principal, the loved one, or the support system really does help us move forward into a successful amount of correction. Psychologically, their opinion of the hearing aid industry or the hearing instrument specialist or the audiologist is what they know prior to coming to see you. This is important to understand. It doesn't matter what happens outside that door. Once they enter the door, it is us that need to gain their trust, give them the respect they deserve for the education we're about to give them so we can change their perception, their opinion, and their ideas of what the hearing aid industry is for them today. And their primary role is to psychologically protect the people they love. They don't want to see them embarrassed. They don't want to see them hurt. They do a lot of changing in their habits psychologically as well to be able to protect the people they love the most. And the feeling of loss of the person that they married, the person that they knew, the someone back in the days when everything was very fluid in their communication and their ability to have that wonderful conversation at any time is gone to them right now. They're in a stage of grief somewhere because they're missing someone. I always tell my patients that I want my two daughters to know my mother the way I knew my mother when she could hear well. And it's impossible for them to know her like that if she can't answer the questions. And another thing that my grandmother said, she always, before she passed away at 96 years old, she had great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren at her feet all the time. And she said to me that she wanted to be able to give the great-grandchildren the stories of the past that she couldn't connect with them unless she could understand their questions. And that was how she was able to give something to them. She said, I didn't have riches to give away. There was no inheritance. But I have my memories and I have my heart. And I can't give my heart or my memories if I can't understand the questions. The loved ones generally will change their lifestyle and their living habits to accommodate for the hearing loss, generally just to keep peace in the relationship itself. So we're going to focus, we focus a lot on the support system. We focus a lot on the loved ones. Having them involved is not a leverage. Having them involved is a team effort because we're also helping them. The staff, the practitioner and the entire staff is principle number three. It's a conduit and success link between the first and second principles, the relationship building. And it's to combine with the four subcategories for the maximum amount of impact that we can have on that person's life with the way we do our job. And these tools are not limited to just what we have up here now. But it's having a strong counseling protocol. And this is what the five principles is, is a strong counseling protocol. Knowing that we are fitting correctly, knowing that we're fitting positively, and knowing that we're doing it in a way that the patient is benefiting the maximum amount. And allowing therapy. There's several different therapy techniques out there. There's actually certain companies that have websites that have games in their websites to be able to, so the patients can do therapy at home, in the privacy of their own home with their loved ones. And making sure that we are being positive in our therapy towards them and making sure we're proper testing and our speech discrimination testing and all of those things, but also being able to therapeutically strengthen their brain and their ability to understand by reading and things such as that. Communication and full team support. When I talk about communication, it's the communication between the practitioner and the second principle, the practitioner and the first principle, or the practitioner of all of us together, and also the communication between the patient and their loved ones. The patient's loved one is also going to be communicating passively to other folks as well. But more importantly, communication with the entire team and staff. Having everyone on the same page to help this patient positively so the patient will feel and their loved ones will feel like they're part of something greater than just a hearing aid or just a hearing aid company. And to do this, we have to continuously train. Not just train ourselves to be better practitioners and the software and things like this, but also train our staff in understanding these things, and we have to train our patients. When I say this, I'm talking about training them to be an advocate for your practice. If they have heard bad things about hearing aids in the world, I want to send them out to plant seeds of good things about hearing aids in the world. And this is how we cultivate the referral system with the program. Having our patients be advocates and evangelists for better hearing. Principle number four is the instrument. The instrument itself is just that. It's an instrument. It's a tool. It's the right tool for the right job, the right technology for the problem. And you have to know how to use it. It's amazing to me sometimes when I have a patient come in from ABC hearings or whoever, and they've got a very sophisticated hearing instrument, or from the VA, with a very sophisticated hearing instrument that has not been programmed or has not been programmed properly. It's almost like building a rocket ship with rocks. It doesn't make sense. Knowing your instrument and making sure you know how to use this tool effectively for your patients, and also making sure that the patient understands that the hearing instruments do not create hearing. They just support the patient's ability to hear. And while you're training, you want to give the patient the respect of the learning. This is something that I felt was second nature. But oftentimes I hear, I've never heard this before. No one's ever told me about this. I didn't know this was part of the system. When I talk to a patient about their brain, about their ability to hear and understand, as opposed to just hearing louder and not better. Give them the right, hard conversation, and give them the power of being part of the solution. When you give them the understanding of their hearing loss, it increases their attitude towards what we're doing in a positive manner, and allows them to be in the system and part of the solution, as opposed to making a decision whether they want to buy something or not. If we don't do commodity, we do better hearing. And time is the fifth principle. This is the conduit, or this is what I would say binds everything together. When we're talking about time and understanding, I'll jump down to ease right away and say, we don't like the term, you'll get used to it, because that indicates that there's going to be struggle or some sort of a conflict or friction. If you're trying to get used to something, it means that it doesn't fit right. We have to understand how the brain is stimulated through hearing. You can't rush the brain's ability to learn at its own pace. This is why it's often used in techniques throughout the years of our patients being counseled properly, is adjusting them for their comfort level without falling back or regressing in their ability to hear and understand. Allowing the brain to discover their new normal, instead of forcing the brain to learn something. Allow the brain to discover their new normal gradually and in a paradigm, just like the hearing loss occurred, we want to give them, although faster, we want to give them a same type of paradigm of their correction as well. We want to counsel them on patience and understanding. This is not just for the third party, if you will, or the second principal, about their patience and the habits that need to be changed there, but also the patient's patience. And oftentimes, if we don't counsel properly, it can be six months down the road or a week after we deliver hearing instruments, or even two years down the road, where the patient comes in, these things never did work. We have to know that they're having troubles, the system will allow us to be ahead of those troubles and we'll be able to give them an understanding of imperfection of what we're working with, and also the patients to know that they can live in the 80% it is good, and if they have an 80% ability to hear and understand and there's 20% of permanent damage, they tend to look at the negative. We want to keep them in that 80% positive. And cognitive reorganization and the brain's ability to shift its needs and responsibility, giving the patient the understanding and the learning education of how their brain works and how it's reorganizing itself, it's going to take time to reverse some of that reorganization and the fact, the hard fact, that sometimes that reversal is not possible. We have to give the hard right as opposed to the easy wrong. And those conversations are very critical and they're very, very important. You'll gain a great deal of respect from your patients when you give them the straight, unfiltered truth about their hearing and their ability to be able to live in a world of sound again. And being consistent. Consistency is paramount. When you're counseling with your patients, you counsel with your patients, it's not a matter of just a series of quarterly checkups and a series of keeping them in your system for five years and hopefully they'll buy new hearing aids from you. You'll see it all the time. If a patient's been with you three, five, six years and they need new technology and they say, well, thanks a lot, I'm going to go try someone else. Just because we were not consistent in our counseling, we were not consistent in our ability to give them a place to feel trusted or a place of trust and comfort to come to and know that they're going to be taken care of properly. And that comes by communication. And once again, communication is paramount as well. To know that we are getting the absolute truth from our patients and not just trying to have them sugar coat it and make it so we don't feel bad about them not hearing the way that they feel they should or we feel they should, we have to have those free flow of communication between the first, second, and third principles so we can have time to be able to work with it properly and they can understand it. And the adjustments of the brain, once again, you won't just get used to it. Allow the brain to discover the new normal on its own, very slowly, very positively, and you'll have greater success. What do you need to know about the five principles? Understanding the amount of personal feelings that are attached to the hearing and understanding. It never surprises me, it never ceases to surprise me, I should say, that how emotional someone can be when they hear again for the first time or they feel like they're hearing clearly for the first time. As a matter of fact, just two days ago we had another very young couple that had been married for a short period of time and he said, I've never heard your voice like this before. Is this what you really sound like? It's beautiful. That is a great deal of emotion and we have to be able to counsel through some of those things. If they're positive, they're great experience and share that with them. If they're negative, we need to be able to work with them so they can understand that they're going to be working through some of those obstacles and it'll take time. The participation of the second principle or the support system and the loved ones, it's no longer just a selling tool. We give them purpose, we give them a position of strength so they can be part of a solution to bring the person that they're grieving about back into their life and have that person get back into their world. We want to be able to put that patient and their loved one back together in that hearing world and communication world and it is critical that that loved one is part of the solution 100% of the time. We want to give the patient the respect of explaining the brain, the difference between hearing and understanding, the difference between volume and clarity, and the difference between loudness and distinction. Giving them those things will reverse some of the bad education or the false rumors that they've heard about hearing aids from other folks that have not had this type of care and counseling. What this does, it gives them a position of power to go out into the world and be an advocate for their better hearing and they can be part of the world from a position of strength as opposed to a position of handicap. Using the first and second principles as a team, it gives us a better understanding of communication dynamics that is unique in every relationship. This goes right back into the third principle of our staff knowing our patients. Having not just a practitioner who sold them hearing aids know that they have two grandchildren and a dog. It goes much deeper than that. Understanding the dynamic of their relationship and what hearing loss has done to that and be able to work with them as a team to go and recreate new, good communication habits. Consistency in the ongoing counseling and care is going to help us create that lasting, trusting relationship with the patient and their loved ones. Working with us as a team as opposed to just coming in and changing a wax guard now and that or a microphone cover, we're actually working with the patients to move them forward into a better hearing experience every single day that they wear their hearing instruments, which they should be wearing every day from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. The five principles concept is very, very flexible. You have to understand that the need for the counseling is a tool. Not every single session is going to flow the same way or every session doesn't have a specific pattern. We do have worksheets that we work with in our office to be able to keep us abreast of what we've been working with in the past in each principle that we've been working with and where we were working in the four subcategories, but we want to make sure that we are flexible in our ability to understanding the five principles. Training the staff is essential to understand how this thing works. The staff from the front office person, your front office staff should know most of the time our front office understands the patients greater than the practitioners do, but more importantly, everyone that comes in contact with the patient and their loved ones should have a good understanding of who they are and have a relationship with them and to be able to give that experience to them being part of a hearing family. It's very critical for them to go on and be able to trust their loved ones, their friends, to refer them to you. Having the hearing instrument as a tool. I cannot emphasize this enough to be able to give the patients that understanding of what the hearing instrument is actually doing for them. Having the patient understand that the hearing aids do not create hearing loss is essential and it creates more trust between, it's a trusting bond between you as well and it also allows them to understand that it's not their fault and that will be explained later on. Everything we've done with the hearing loss with the loved ones and with the patients themselves have created bad habits and challenges. So we have to change these habits and there's going to be challenges that go along with that as well. We're overcoming, like I said, years and sometimes decades of hearing loss conditioning and we're going to be attempting to make a progressive reprogramming of the brain or those habits to a better hearing experience and understanding. That's going to take time and expect some challenges and some pushback in those conversations but as long as you're honest and true with them, they will understand what their role is and how much work will be involved. The five principles of understanding cognitive reorganization will help battle the opinions that they've been given in the past and they're going to continue to be bombarded by those opinions about how someone will tell them that their hearing aids never did work and never is a harsh word where your patients are well prepared to be out in that world where they say, well I love my hearing instruments and they say, well where did you buy them? Well I didn't buy my hearing instruments, I don't like it when someone says they bought something from me. What they're doing is they're getting their hearing cared for at Summit Hearing Solutions and that's how they respond. Emotions and psychology are the two consistent and strong factors that we're really going to be dealing with with each of the principles that we're working with and they have to have first acceptance of their loss and acceptance of their success. Prior to this webinar, I had a patient look at me and she said, I went to so many other folks, why is it working now and not before? I'm skeptical. Those are the principles, those are the challenges that we'll have to work on together and that is what a skeptical patient to me is probably the most fun to work with because all the challenges are on the table and we get to work with each individual challenge as it comes up. We have to define the subcategories for each of our patients and their loved ones, where they are in their unique setting, in their communication, is the psychological issue a big deal? Is the mental and the attitude issue a big deal? Is the physical issue a big deal or is it strictly emotional? And the loved one is going to be in a different place than the patient or the patient is going to be definitely in a different place than the loved one until we get them synced up and working together, you can start seeing the progression of their success as it goes along. Understanding the difference between hearing and understanding is another thing that we counsel a great deal on. Hearing is incomplete. Hearing is not complete without clarity. We have for some reason in our society, we believe, I should say we because we're the ones that are helping folks understand this, but the general population is under the belief that louder is better. If you just look at me and yell or if you look at me and raise your voice or if you turn off the TV, I will hear better and they get frustrated because it is not. We have to be able to help them understand that clarity and better is better, not louder is better. First step for the first principle of success is acceptance. Like I said, working through the idea of grief and the process of grief and mourning, finding out where they are and working them through to the acceptance phase is critical. During those stages, for not just the patient, but also for the loved ones as well. Take them on the journey with you. Allow them to walk by your side, not behind you. Don't talk down to them. These are all portions of respect so we can earn their trust. Establishing the importance of consistent and continuous counseling. I want to talk about that for a moment just to say that we don't want to have the idea of having a repetitive appointment setting. Every patient should have an appointment before they leave, but they have to have an appointment for purpose. We don't want them just to come in for a two minute change of microphone cover like I said before. We want to give them benefit on every visit we have. And it's much more important than just patient retention. Keeping them around is not going to do us any good if they don't trust us for their next stage or their family members or their friends or the people that they care about the most. And counseling with the second principle one-on-one will help us also do that. It gives respect to the patient, knowing that we are working with their spouse or their loved ones or their support system and helping them through this system as well. And also let them know that they have someone that understands and is on their side to be able to make that and help the third party or second principle understand what they're going through. It's very, very, very important to give them value and purpose in this system. Establishing a relationship that perpetuates patient retention and, more importantly, or just as importantly, I have to say, is the referral system. With Summit Hearing Solutions, year to date, I think we're at 29% referrals, which is really, really nice. I like that. We could probably kick it up a couple percentages, but we're working on this to make sure that our patients trust us with the people they love the most. And the counseling techniques are as varied as there are practitioners. They're varied as there are dispensers. But we want to make sure the bottom line is to get to know our patients and establish a real practitioner-patient relationship. When a patient can come from the hospital and the first place they stop off is their hearing aid guy and give them news of their chemotherapy or their doctor's appointment before they even go home. Now, that's when you know you've got a pretty deep relationship with one of your patients, and that is where we pride ourselves in being able to establish those deep, meaningful relationships with our patients, and they trust us with the people they love the most. Now, that acronym, as you see up there, is called keeping heart and mind and allowing the first and second principles to open up to you and earning their trust. When I talk about heart, that's another completely different webinar, but the acronym stands for hunger for wisdom, expect the best, accept responsibility, respond with courage, and think others first. Keeping that in mind as a practitioner and as a staff will allow us to be able to put ourselves in a caring attitude towards our patients as much as we possibly can. We want to give the patients, like I said, the respect of knowledge, explaining the cognition of the audition to them in a way that they can understand it, and we'll link the hearing to the brain and have them understand that. Patients deserve that respect, and they deserve for us to give them real explanations and to give them the power of that knowledge, and it's what we have to give them and the bad news with the good news as a caring practitioner are the consequences of not getting help as well as the benefits of amplification support, and this is something that really does make an impact, and this is primarily for one of our new patients or a patient that is coming in a prospect that has not been through our counseling in the past. Acknowledging the courage it takes to even come to see us. It takes, on the average, and we've heard this statistic before, 7 to 10 years for a patient to pick up the phone and ask for help. We want to make sure that we acknowledge their courage. We want to give them the respect of that as well. Every phone call, speaking of 7 to 10 years, every phone call is important in how it's handled and it's critical to create and start the foundation of that relationship. In most cases, the practitioners probably shouldn't be taking this phone call because we have professionals, trained professionals, PPAs and PCCs that are trained to make sure that that delicate conversation is handled properly, and we want to make sure that they, the process of the five principles is beginning right there with a strong, caring foundation of a professional PPA or PCC taking that telephone call and handling it in the most caring way. The entire concept, like I said, and the journey can't be applied with each and every appointment. It has to flow naturally and we have to understand these dynamics of each of the subcategories for each patient, and that takes time to get to know our patients. By investing that time into getting to know them, they respond in kind with a great deal of respect, and it's designed to expand upon individually as their relationships change as well. We want to make sure we have that principle by principle. Continued counseling on the five principles will naturally bring our patient and their loved ones to the refitting process and the decision without any pressure. We're not selling hearing aids. We're providing better hearing, and that relationship, buzzword relationship selling, is not going to help us if we don't really believe what we're doing and we don't really apply the relationship care concept. The five principles will give you an active tool to create that trust and create that relationship, and this is truly a way to create a relationship care protocol for your patients. Once again, and I'm going to be able to wrap this up in a few minutes here, is the understanding that hearing is incomplete and it's the only ability to respond to sound with volume going up or going down, and it's not about clarity. Clarity and understanding is the ability to process the complete sound to the body's ability, and it's our job to make sure we do this strong and well for each and every patient and their loved ones. That concludes my webinar for today. I hope it was beneficial. If you have any questions, feel free to give us questions at any time. Thank you very much. Thanks, Ted, for a great presentation. Ted, we're so excited that over 150 people have joined us today on this webinar. As Ted said, we do have some time for questions. If you have a question for Ted, please enter it in the question box on your webinar dashboard. Ted, our first question comes from Bill, and Bill asks, how do you use these five principles with a person that doesn't want their spouse or their third party present? That's a really good question, Bill. Thank you. Well, first of all, we don't want to not give them the audience, but we want to counsel them through the process by talking about their spouse or their third party. How does their hearing loss affect them? Ask them questions that bring their loved one into the conversation as a focus point, and then explain to them at that time that it's really critical that we have the team together. If it's done properly and you are doing it in a respectful manner, they'll come to that conclusion themselves. This just happened, as a matter of fact, thank you, Bill, this just happened last week with a patient, and he told me straight up, he says, I didn't want to bring my wife because I didn't trust why you needed her here. Now I understand it. I'm going to go get her. And we have him rescheduled to come back in to complete the process and to start our journey all over again. Thank you. That was a great question. Great. Thanks, Ted. Ted, our next question comes from Marty, and Marty asks, do you ever find it beneficial to work with a patient only, no family members present for maybe just one session? I'm sorry, say that again. I didn't hear that quite well enough. Marty asks, do you ever find it beneficial to work with the patient only, no family members present for maybe just, say, one session? Yes. Once again, the idea of five principles is a fluid process. There may be something that needs to be discussed specifically with the patient, but during that time when we're alone with the patient without the second principle there, we want to reiterate the importance of their participation on our next visit. And also we want to send them back to their loved ones with questions and also an explanation of the session that we just had. So they're still part of the process. They just may not be there for that particular one session. Great. Thanks, Ted. Ted, our next question is from Susan, and Susan asks, how are these principles used with cost objections? That's a good question, and I was waiting for that one to come up. Cost should be the only objection that we have, but seeing the amount of time invested, value invested, and the importance of hearing and brain health and whole health generally gives them the understanding of what the cost is. It's not expensive but valuable. And now not everyone can have the resources for the top-of-the-line hearing instrument, but when you have a patient that just has the only objection is cost, you have put them in a great place because everything else that you've been working with is working. Once they see the value in what you're doing, it gives them comfort knowing that they're spending their money wisely on their future and their health. That's a really good question. Thank you, Susan. Ted, our next question is from Stanley. Stanley asks, how do these principles produce referrals, and when do you ask for the referral? Actually, that's a great question. They produce referrals by the relationship-building that we're creating. I've had patients come to me before the fitting, before the final delivery of their hearing instruments, with a list of friends and loved ones that they have that they want to have come to us, and on two or three occasions, we actually have the person come and bring someone that they love, that has a hearing loss, to their delivery to have an exam at that time, too. Now, when do I ask for a referral? I don't ask for referrals. I don't ask them in the traditional way of for referrals. I certainly don't have an incentive program that pays our patients for referrals. What I have found was, every time we're in contact with a patient and their loved ones, or just their loved ones, if they were bringing the hearing instruments in for a service or something like this, every time we're in contact with them gives them a feeling and understanding that we're part of their solution, and that is the referral push that they deserve, and that's the referral push that we give them. So every time we're in contact with a patient, we just remind them of their care, and the process of referrals takes care of itself. It seems very simple and ambiguous, but it really does work. Thanks, Ted. Ted, our next question is from Karen. Karen asks, what do you think is the weakness for big box stores selling hearing aids? I'm sorry, say that again, please. What do you think is the biggest weakness for big box stores selling hearing aids? That's a good question. Now, I'm going to preface this with, I apologize for stepping on anybody's toes that might be working in a big box store, but I think the weakness is that personal touch. I think the weakness is that actual deep caring relationship you can cultivate with a patient and that trust that you're earning because the feeling of buying a commodity is not as perpetual as the feeling of being cared for by a professional practitioner. Not that the folks at the big box stores are not professional practitioners. It's just the perception and the feeling of being cared for by your, if you will, ear doctor or your hearing doctor or someone that they can feel like they have a direct, deep understanding of your hearing. And that is, I think, the major flaw in that model, if you will. Thanks, Ted. Ted, our next question is from Helen. And Helen has a question that sort of expands on Karen's question. And her question is, can these five principles be easily applied within the big box environment? You know, I think they can. I think they can, but I'm not too familiar with how the big box stores, what their boundaries are and what the practitioner can do to work with the patient. The five principles is a very personalized type of system. Now, if you have the latitude in your particular location that your supervisor will allow you to have that time and space to be able to work with the first and second principles, to be able to cultivate that relationship, I'd say go for it. It should be integrated in every model. The problem is, it does take time. And you are investing your time and your expertise into each and every one of those relationships or visits for the relationship. And I'm not sure if that is part of the model of a big box store. But I'm sure it can be applied. Because, honestly, this is for training for a practitioner and put a system in place to make the practitioner more valuable to the patient than the actual selling process of a hearing aid. I hope that helps, Ray. Thanks, Ted. Ted, we have one more question from Charles. And Charles asks, in working with dementia patients, it's mandatory that family members be present. However, normal hearing family members sometimes expect instant correction of hearing loss in their loved ones. How do you explain that normal hearing may never be achieved and their expectation may need to be reduced a little? Oh, that's a great question. And this is where I think we stumble and stub our toes quite often in the past in our industry is not having that critical, strong conversation with the loved ones and showing them the conduit between the ears and the hearing and the brain and explaining them and having a hard conversation about their loved one's limited abilities and the body's limited abilities and the brain's limited abilities and the limited abilities of the hearing instruments themselves. That is the concept of being able to, on the fourth principle, is having that conversation with the loved ones about the hearing instrument being just the right tool for the right job and understanding how it works and how to use it. And it does not create hearing, but it does support the body's ability to hear. That's the conversation we have to have with the loved ones. And that also will earn you the trust and respect of those loved ones, and you will see that relationship open up amazingly well once they understand that concept. That's a great question. And that was a great answer. Thanks, Ted. Ted, I want to thank you for an excellent presentation, and I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today on the IHS webinar, Five Principles to Amplification Success, Patient Retention, and Referrals. If you'd like to get in contact with Ted, you may email him at ted at summithearingsolutions.com for more information about receiving a continuing education credit for this webinar through IHS or AHIP. Visit the IHS website at ihsinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner or find more information on the webinar tab on the navigation menu. IHS members receive a substantial discount on CE credits, so if you're not already an IHS member, you'll find more information at ihsinfo.org. Please keep an eye out for the feedback survey that you'll receive tomorrow via email. We ask that you take just a moment to answer a few brief questions about today's presentation. Thank you again for being with us today, and we will see you at the next IHS webinar. ♪

amplification success

patient retention

referrals

relationships

counseling

trust

subcategories

holistic approach

patient satisfaction