Interview with Markus Hilbert & Florin Voinescu

Topic: Ear Works Inc. Tools & Solutions

Markus Hilbert, Au.D.


Florin Voinescu

CAROLYN SMAKA: I'm pleased to have the opportunity to speak today with Markus Hilbert and Florin Voinescu of Ear Works Inc.

Markus, can you start by telling us about your background and providing a brief company overview?

MARKUS HILBERT: Sure. I'm an Au.D practicing in Calgary, Canada. In addition to running Ear Works Inc., I work as a clinical audiologist in the practice that I once owned and operated, and later sold.

Ear Works Inc. provides solutions to private practices - from software to consulting services, to human resources, marketing, business development, you name it. We find solutions using our own internal resources or those of our experienced strategic partners for pretty much anything a clinic might encounter as a business challenge. We focus on private practices - those who don't want to join a buying group and/or those who don't have the resources to compete with the larger players in the marketplace.



SMAKA: Thanks, Markus. Florin, can you talk about your background and your role at Ear Works Inc.?

FLORIN VOINESCU: Certainly. My main role in Ear Works Inc. is development, that is, finding and building the best tools for the independent practices to get better at what they do, and to do it easier. In addition to development, I provide support and technical assistance with our existing tools for any needs a clinic may have.

Professionally, I'm a programmer. I'm a computer specialist focused on business applications and I have a Bachelor of Science in programming with economic applications. I worked in internal financial analysis and internal system development for a large media corporation in Romania before I moved to Canada.

Markus hired me to help him build his dream system, which is a paper-free system for running his own clinic, and then to expand upon that for use with other clinics.

SMAKA: How did you two meet?

HILBERT: I'd had numerous false starts building a practice management system. Problems included integration with programs like QuickBooks and other database solutions. Ultimately though, I found that when it comes to software, hearing aid dispensing is a very complicated process and programmers generally don't understand it.

So I placed an ad for a programmer who was willing to do office admin for a period of time to get a hands-on understanding of the business. Florin answered the ad and that's exactly what he did. He was our back office paper handler and biller and file manager. That hands-on experience enabled him to build a system that reflected the daily workflow and needs of our business.

VOINESCU: The system was originally built for me based on the needs I identified while I did my work. Then, of course, the system grew to include supporting the clinical role and the receptionist role. We further expanded the system based on recommendations from clients, and now the system expands with the recommendations of the users.

SMAKA: What are some of the challenges that small private practices are up against today?

HILBERT: The number one problem in a small organization is internal structure. Internal systems are not commonly linked in our minds to actual business success, but they are indeed critical for many reasons.

The solution is to streamline your internal systems so that you don't have as many distractions in administration and processes, and then you'll have much more time to spend listening to and assisting your patients. If we can streamline processes and manage data, we can also help you make personal connections that are important to clinical relationships with your patients. For example, if your system reminds you of birthdays, or of important information to the patient that your receptionist can use when the patient calls in, we are now handling people, and not files. The personal side of business is huge, and often the disconnect between the clinical side and the system side is a problem.

Another challenge to small businesses is marketing, where they are trying to compete against larger players who have more funds and resources like marketing departments with a wider reach. What is marketing if not word of mouth? Anything that can help word of mouth - from staying in touch by email, using online resources, letters, and phone calls - is often seen as somehow not as important as the big marketing campaigns that are more visible. The smaller practice can actually piggyback on the larger campaigns of other clinics and benefit from the advertisement that the competition is doing. That is a solution to a problem of 'how do I get my name out there?'. Run a smaller promotion at the same time as the larger company is running theirs and some of that traffic may also come to you because the of the awareness factor.

Naturally, there are other challenges such as financial issues. In a recession patients may not be as willing to part with their hard earned or hard saved dollars. In addition, you have to consider your own cash flow - you want to create as much efficiency and have as little inefficiency as possible in your business so you can meet the cash flow conundrum. We provide support for these kinds of problems.

Job security and staff retention are further challenges. It's a much more numbers-oriented industry now than it was ten years ago. Many companies are looking to maximize profits possibly at the expense of staff. In traditional accounting, people or payroll is counted as a liability not as an asset. We need to change that traditional, industrial-type thinking, and perceive our staff as assets instead.

These are some of the problems that our solutions address in order to drive benefits.

SMAKA: Markus what about staying up to date with technology? Is that an issue for folks in private practice?

HILBERT: Yes. A lot of smaller practices are partnering with a few specific suppliers so their knowledge of products that they don't provide is very limited. They can't intelligently speak in detail about product features that other manufacturers offer, or do product comparisons.

For this problem, we offer Aid Finder, an online tool to help clinicians and users learn about products. Using Aid Finder, you can look at some of the differences in directionality or feedback management and really understand, 'what is manufacturer X's midrange technology compared to manufacturer Y's midrange'. You can make these comparisons outside of the information that the manufacturers provide.
Aid Finder also saves time in that you don't have to read each manufacturer's spec sheets.

Aid Finder can be branded and put on a clinic's website for consumers, and it can also be used for staying up to date and training staff on products that they aren't familiar with.

SMAKA: Marketing is a hot topic in this economy and you mentioned a few ideas to help - what else does Ear Works have to offer in regard to marketing?

HILBERT: When our clients run our software, we can data mine and find out exactly where their needs are coming from, how their referral sources are working, what works, and what doesn't. We can then customize marketing solutions to their very own demographic. Even though two clinics might be in the same city, for example, they may draw different demographics, due to location or staff, etc. Understanding exactly who your current clients are and using that information to streamline the marketing process by marketing directly to them, will increase your return. It's better not to spread yourself thin by trying to appeal to the masses. Focusing on your core demographic is going to keep you in business and help you succeed.

We partner with proven marketing companies who can perform additional assessments for clinics. These are vetted, experienced experts who have proven successes in the industry or similar industries. We make the connection between the marketing companies and the audiology practice, so the audiologist does not have to go through the time consuming process of finding a marketing company, vetting them, making sure they're the right one and provide the best deal, and then hope for the best. In our case, we already know that they're going to give the best because they've proven that in the past.

SMAKA: Another hot topic you mentioned earlier is personnel management. What are some of the tools that Ear Works has to help with personnel issues?

HILBERT: In terms of HR, we provide an in-house service where we work with the team in a clinic to assess each person's strengths. We use tools like the Kolbe assessment that you can find at our website, www.earworksinc.com. We identify where strengths and weaknesses lie and then assess whether everybody's on the bus or if everybody's on the right part of the bus. Maybe the driver should be the mechanic. We will find out exactly how we can maximize the strengths and gifts of the people who are already on staff, rather than force people into familiar molds to maintain the status quo. Maximizing people's personal strengths benefits both the staff and the employer. We also partner with HR experts as needed.



The Ear Works Inc. Toolkit has software and services that include marketing, consulting, connections, sourcing, expert, consumer, and global components. These components or can be used alone or in any combination to serve a practice's needs.

SMAKA: Your solutions cover a wide scope - software, marketing, HR and I see you've even created your own audiology font. How did this come about?

VOINESCU: The audiology fonts were created in response to a need we identified while we were creating the new version of Ear Works in 2008. At that time we tried to find existing fonts that included audiological symbols for audiograms but nothing was available. So we decided to build them from scratch using our designers and our resources. We created a set of fonts, refined them, and now they are used in Ear Works 4.0 whenever you print an audiogram. They can also be used explicitly with reports. In addition, we are now offering the fonts as a separate download for all clinicians who might need them for their own reports. You don't have to have Ear Works 4.0 in order to have the fonts - you can just go to our website and download them for free.

SMAKA: I think it's interesting that you pulled these fonts out of your software to allow people to access them as separate tools, similarly to what you did with Aid Finder.

VOINESCU: With the free tools, we also took another direction by creating an open-pro initiative. It's an open discussion group that's also on our Linked-In page, which all professionals can join to discuss various subjects of interest. This is similar to what we did with our support community site where we openly offer free support for all the Ear Works 3.0 and 4.0 users. Free support was one of our main principles right from the get-go. We always saw support as a free service that needs to be provided to everyone. Through community effort, this support is actually building a dynamic knowledge base online where anyone can find an answer quickly because likely the question has been asked before.

So in addition to simply providing free tools, we've created a space where people can find answers, either from us or by clinician helping clinician.

SMAKA: It seems very progressive to me to allow open access to these tools that you've created.

HILBERT: The tools are custom assembled to fit whatever needs that people might have. For example, I had a contract to write audiological rehab pamphlets for clinics that did not have the time or the resources to write them themselves. There are a lot of different needs that come up day to day in a business. Essentially, we invite all private practices to contact us and tell us your need, your goal or your desired outcome, and we'll find the right solutions to achieve that outcome. That's really the idea.

SMAKA: Tell me about this contest you now have underway.

HILBERT: As Florin mentioned, one of the things we're doing is building an open community of professionals. One important issue facing all of us today is the hearing aid adoption rate. How do we change the adoption rate in which only 25 percent of people who need hearing aids are wearing them? How can we, as a profession, address the question of how to reach the non-user rather than just consider marketing or market share of our individual clinics.

Our contest is called reachthenonuser.com. At that site, you will be able to work in a group and share your thoughts and ideas as well as interact with others as part of our Linked-In community discussion. It would be really interesting for us to engage each other across regional boundaries, practice sites, etc. and examine what we are doing as a profession to reach the non-user. In addition, there's a contest to win an iPad and Ear Works 4.0 Premium license - all the details are on the website.

SMAKA: That is a big nut to crack and the more collaborating we can do as a profession, the better.

HILBERT: That's right. In our contest, everyone gets to see everyone else's comments and ideas. We encourage participation: the winner will be the one who has given the most quality responses to other people's input. It's all about really talking and opening channels rather than closing them off and worrying only about our inner circle. Let's look out into the market as a whole and decide what we're going to do differently as a profession and as individual clinics to change the hearing aid adoption rate.

SMAKA: Can't wait to see all the ideas from the contest.

Markus and Florin, thanks for your time today and for sharing what's new at Ear Works Inc. I enjoyed exploring your site myself today, and I'll direct our readers to www.earworksinc.com or the Ear Works web channel on AudiologyOnline for more information.