These are the five exact questions verbatim that you have to ask before scheduling an appointment to buy hearing aids. Since over a million people watch my YouTube videos every month, it's no surprise that a common question I get asked is, where should I go to buy hearing aids? After all, these days you can pretty much buy hearing aids anywhere. You can go online. You can go into an ENT clinic, you can go into an audiology clinic. You can go to the VA clinic. You can go to a big box store. Heck, you can probably even buy them from a guy who lives in a van down by the river. If you name it, you can probably buy hearing aids from them, but just because you can buy hearing aids anywhere doesn't mean that you should buy hearing aids anywhere. At least not if you want to have success with them.

Virtually half of the patients who come into my clinic only come in because they had a really bad experience at another clinic, or they had a poor treatment outcome from the place that they purchased their hearing aids from only to have to spend more money for us to fix the problem. Now, it's not that we have some secret treatment or some special hearing aids that you've never heard of. We just follow comprehensive Best Practices with a person-centered care approach to ensure that you get the maximum amount of benefit out of your devices. However, we're just one clinic in the state of Arizona, so if you're part of the 99.9% of channel viewers who do not live in Arizona, I wanna teach you the specific questions that you should be asking before deciding where to go to get your next set of hearing aids, and specifically these five questions.

The first question that you should ask before even scheduling your appointment is, "Do you follow Best Practices?" Best Practices are possibly the most critical component of achieving high level success with hearing aids. Essentially, they're a long list of procedures that must be completed by your hearing care professional to ensure that they select the best hearing aids for you fit and program those hearing aids the best way possible, and provide you with high quality follow-up care. Now, like I said, there are a lot of them. For instance, you have real ear measurement, which is the way that we verify that your hearing aids are programmed correctly to your hearing loss prescription. That is a Best Practice. You also have test box measures, which are used to make sure that your hearing aids are meeting manufacturer specifications. That is a Best Practice procedure. You also have validation outcome measures like the COSI, the IOI-HA and the APHAB, which are used to identify if you're having subjective benefit with your hearing aids.

That is also a Best Practice procedure, and these are only three of many Best Practices that must be completed to ensure that you have a high level outcome with your hearing aids. If you wanna learn more about Best Practices, I have an entire video where I explain them in more detail that I will link in the description. Now, remember, you are likely asking this question and all of the rest of these questions to the receptionist that may not have a detailed understanding about Best Practices. However, if a particular clinic does follow Best Practices, this should not be a foreign term to the receptionist at that clinic. Now, if the receptionist needs to go and ask one of the professionals if they do follow Best Practices, that's okay, but if they come back and say anything other than, yes, we follow Best Practices, then you do not pass go.

You do not collect $200. You do not schedule an appointment with that clinic. That being said, even if they say they do, that does not mean that they follow comprehensive Best Practices, which is why you need to ask more questions. The second one being, "How long are your initial hearing test and consultation appointments?" Obtaining a deep understanding of your unique hearing loss and your specific wants, needs, and values takes time. While my clinic typically schedules two hours for this initial hearing test and consultation, this is not the industry norm. Ideally, a clinic will schedule an initial appointment with you for at least 60 minutes or more unless you're only scheduling to get a hearing test done, which could take as little as 30 minutes. One requirement of following a person-centered care approach, which requires a deep understanding of your specific wants, needs, and values is time.

If you do not get at least 60 minutes with your hearing care professional before they actually make a recommendation to you on hearing aids, then chances are you're going to a clinic that is more focused on efficiency than they are optimal treatment outcomes. The third question you should be asking is, "How many times will I see my hearing care provider during my hearing aid trial period and on an ongoing basis?" While I do not like calling the initial fitting period with hearing aids a trial period, this is what most clinics call them, and they typically give you anywhere between 30 and 90 days to try your hearing aids. If they say that you only get one pre-scheduled visit and then after that visit, it's on an as-needed basis, this is a red flag and you should not schedule an appointment with that clinic. Ideally, a clinic will pre-schedule three to four visits inside of a 30 to 90 day window to ensure that they have enough time to follow comprehensive Best Practice procedures.

In addition to this, after the trial period is over, they should also be pre-scheduling visits with you in the future, approximately three to six months down the road, at least until you become an experienced hearing aid user. Pre-scheduled appointments ensure that you have long-term success with your hearing aids because as sure as I know that the sun will come up tomorrow, your hearing aids are gonna run into some issues that your provider's gonna have to solve for you. If a clinic just says, call us when you need us, that is another huge red flag because you know what? Most people don't call when they're small problems. They only call when it's a huge problem, but your performance has been declining the entire time. The fourth question you need to ask before scheduling an appointment to get hearing aids is, "How many hearing aid brands do you dispense?"

I cannot tell you how sick I am of hearing that one hearing aid brand is the best. If anyone ever tells you that their hearing aid is the best, then they're full of crap and you need to run the other way. The simple fact of the matter is, is that there is no one hearing aid brand that is best for everybody, so if you end up going into a clinic and they only sell one brand of hearing aids, then that means that they do not care about your wants, needs, values, or anything like that. They just wanna sell you whatever they have, regardless of whatever your hearing loss is. Sure the hearing aid they sell you will be better than nothing, but if your goal for hearing treatment is to achieve better than nothing hearing, then be my guest. However, if your goal is to hear your absolute best, then you need to make sure that you schedule an appointment with a clinic that dispenses multiple brands of hearing aids from different hearing aid manufacturers.

This way, your hearing care professional can select the best hearing aid for you, not the best hearing aid for them. And the fifth and final question that you should be asking before scheduling an appointment to get hearing aids is, "How much do you charge for the initial appointment?" Now, I know that I'm gonna get criticized for this one, but quite frankly, I don't care. If a hearing aid clinic gives away free hearing tests, what do you think that communicates about the motive of that appointment? Not always, but most of the time, that indicates that that clinic is more interested in selling you hearing aids than they are about treating your hearing loss. Now, that might not sound like much of a difference to you, but trust me, there is a huge difference between going to a hearing aid clinic that is focused on hearing aid sales and going to a hearing aid clinic that is focused on optimal treatment outcomes.

Sales focused clinics do everything in their power to drive in more leads. That's right. You're not called a patient. You're called a lead internally inside of these organizations so they can hard sell you on a pair of hearing aids only to get you treated with those hearing aids as quickly as possible to get you out the door so they can bring in the next person to hard sell hearing aids to. They know that if you do not buy hearing aids, that they just wasted their time because they gave you a free initial hearing test. On the other hand, clinics that charge for their initial hearing test and their initial consultation are much less motivated to sell you a set of hearing aids because they know that their valuable time is being compensated for. Do clinics that charge for initial hearing tests and initial consultation still wanna sell you hearing aids?

The answer to that is yes, but it is not their number one goal because they know they could sell a lot more hearing aids if they made this appointment free, rather than charging for it. They would just rather get compensated based on the quality of the time that they spend with you rather than devices that they sell to you. That being said, can you also get good service from a clinic that gives you a free hearing test? The answer to that is yes, but the probability of getting higher quality service is also lower. And there you go. Those are the five questions that I would ask - and why - before you schedule an appointment to get hearing aids. Notice that I did not tell you to ask how much your hearing aids cost or if you accept my insurance. If you're the type of person who wants to know the answer to those two particular questions, then chances are you're gonna find yourself in a really low quality clinic and your treatment outcome is not gonna be as good. If your goal is to hear your absolute best and you need to ask questions that will lead you to a better treatment outcome, not ask questions, that will lead you to a cut rate care. That being said, I have put together a PDF of these

particular questions that you can download from my website HearingUp.com, or from the link that I've put in the description of this video. If you have other questions that you have found to be extremely valuable in identifying a really good hearing aid clinic, then please leave us those questions in the comment section so we can all see them. Overall, your success or failure with hearing aids heavily depends on the clinic and provider that you see, and if you ask the right questions, it will significantly increase the chances that you'll love your hearing care professional and you'll love your hearing aids.