Advanced Hearing & Balance Center

We signed up at the beginning of 2021 because we were looking to have a variety of services in one package. We needed to be able to verify and manage incoming and outgoing phone calls as well as record them and monitor the productivity of our staff. We also wanted to be able to send text messages to patients, digital forms, and inbound and outbound faxes.

It’s really awesome. We were paying a lot of money for the system we had before because you know, it’s all e-fax now. Weave is HIPAA compliant, so we can send inbound and outbound faxes. We get a lot of medical record requests. Because we see vestibular patients, some of our patient files are pretty thick—they can be 50 to 60 pages or upward whenever an entire chart is requested. Even though the faxes are limited to a certain amount of space, it auto-populates a second or third fax if needed and will say like ‘one of three, two of three, three of three,’ so you don’t have to manually go in and do that. We can also set up any kind of forms we want to send to patients prior to their arrival. Right now, we utilize that for our pre-COVID screening information.

We were able to get rid of our after-hours answering service, which is saving us about $1800-$2,000 a month because we get a lot of missed calls in the evenings and on the weekends. Now, whenever we miss a call, whether during or after clinic hours, the person gets an automated message either letting them know we’re closed and when they can expect a callback or giving them the option to communicate with us via text, and then we can respond to them right from our own phones. So, it gives patients that feeling of instant gratification—even if they can’t verbally speak with somebody, they can still have their concerns heard. And hopefully, it’ll prevent them from contacting another clinic and taking their business somewhere else.

Another thing that’s really neat is Weave’s internal messaging system. We have group chats and individual chats where we can talk about patients, say patient names, things like that. We can communicate with each other without having to be in the office or sitting in front of a computer. Basically, the Weave mobile app gives you access to everything you would on a desktop. And like I said before, it’s all HIPAA compliant.

This might sound a little harsh, but business is business. If an employee makes a mistake, whether they own up to it or not, it’s nice to have that feature because we can play the recording back to refresh their memory and then talk to them about it. It’s almost like being able to discuss it in real-time. Sometimes I cringe listening to the recordings, but it’s mind-blowing. It’s something that management and business owners need to have because you don’t know what’s being said when you’re not standing there and how many corners are being cut. Now when patients claim they were told something different on the phone, we can go back and listen to the call to verify or confirm it because we certainly want to honor what our staff says or quotes to patients. I also like that I get a text message when my staff misses a call because then I know how many calls are not being answered.

It’s like that saying: if you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait till you hire an amateur. That’s kind of how I felt when we got Weave. Like where has this been? Why haven’t we invested in this before? All of the tools we now have access to in one program were causing so many gaps in our processes and protocols before. Things were slipping through the cracks. We weren’t able to manage our patients as easily. We didn’t have the texting capability. It’s really changed things for us. Especially in the days of COVID, being able to text message patients after hours is amazing. It’s almost like having an on-call person all the time. I feel like it’s upped our game in the concierge service department. As a business owner, you don’t know what you don’t know. So, you need to try new things. Weave has allowed us to communicate with our team and our patients at a much higher level and on a more consistent basis.

That’s hard—we take advantage of a lot of the programs. I guess I would say the staff training and development opportunities and the help with onboarding and training new employees. We can do all the crunch training in the beginning in our office but it’s CQ Partners that helps us instill the right mindset in our employees to operate based on driving revenue into the practice and the continuation of care for our patients. We also always enjoy going to CQ Partners’ meetings. Being able to network with other owners and tour other businesses is invaluable. We get to see so much that we don’t necessarily see inside of our own walls. And we get to hear about what’s working for other practices. It’s almost like insider trading or something. [Laughs]

We set our 2022 goals back in November at the MBA planning meeting. Our Account Manager helped us to dive into our business and take a look at our numbers and our team and what we needed to do to hit the growth we’re aiming for this year. Our top goal is to have more consistent training with our staff because they’re the ones that are helping us to drive revenue into this practice on a day-to-day basis. We really do need them to be on board with our vision and mission. We’re also trying to get a better grip on our KPIs. We want to make sure we know what’s going on with the business. Those numbers tell a story. It tells us if we need to change directions and what strategies we should implement. Lastly, just like everyone else since COVID hit, we’ve been short-staffed. So, we’re looking to hire. The recruiting services we get from Jason [DiOttavio] have been stellar. He has brought in qualified candidates that possess the skill set we need in a busy practice like ours.