Practice Name: All About Hearing/Alpine ENT
Fuel Member for: One year
Formerly with: Elite Hearing Network
This month we spoke with Lisa Domke, Audiology Technician, about All About Hearing/Alpine ENT’s experience working with Fuel Medical Group.
If you could describe your experience with Fuel in 3 words, what would they be?
Above and beyond. With Dan and Alan, my regional team at Fuel, there’s just such a good personal touch and I actually look forward to our weekly meetings. Very early on in our transition to Fuel, I asked Dan to work on a booklet to hand out to hearing aid patients. We had a lot of projects going on with Fuel and it fell through the cracks. When Dan realized the issue, he immediately had the team get started on creating not only that piece, but ultimately, about 20 different brochure versions to make sure we had choices. They’re creating one in Spanish, one about vestibular–I have never seen a company work so hard to correct such a small mistake. Anytime I say, “I don’t love this,” the answer is immediately, “OK. How do we fix it?”
Did you have concerns about joining Fuel Medical early on?
We had a concern about decentralized billing. I was also worried about losing some of our marketing dollars and promotions through Elite, and that our hearing aid pricing might increase.
Did any of those concerns stick around after you joined Fuel?
No. In fact, moving away from centralized billing has been pleasantly fantastic. Yes, it was nice to go to one place and see what we paid and pay everything at once, but the flip side is that we have way more transparency now about what we spend on things. With Elite, I could only look back and see what we had paid. With Fuel, because we’re working directly through our manufacturers, we know what we will pay. That allows me to make better decisions about our pricing and how we’re billing patients.
What about those other concerns?
The hearing aid pricing is much better than I expected-it actually went down when we joined Fuel. And Fuel has been wonderful about making sure we didn’t feel like we were losing any of our former benefits. All I had to do was mention any concerns to Dan, and they were taken care of and looked better than they did before.
What advice would you give to other Fuel members who are coming over from Elite?
Get in touch more is my biggest advice. Ask every question you have. I have a standing weekly meeting with Dan and Alan, and it has helped us catch a lot of projects that Fuel can help us with that I didn’t even realize. Dan is an audiologist, so he’s been looking into helping us design our own vestibular program for training. Fuel is also recruiting audiology technicians for us and taking on some of the training through Fuel’s Aud Tech program. I had no idea that was going to be available. Being able to just stick our new aud techs in front of a computer to do some of their training has taken a lot off my plate. If Fuel can’t help with something, they’ll tell you, “We can’t help with that.” But I have yet to hear that answer.