A Massachusetts hearing practice is using an interactive website to educate patients.

Upon opening Enhanced Auditory Resources (EAR) in Newton, MA, in 2007, one of the first things William Mason, MD, and Kenneth Bozeman, AuD, PhD, CCC-A, did was create a website. But it wasn’t until they aligned themselves with a company that specializes in healthcare-specific web offerings that the duo realized the full potential of reaching patients through the Internet.

“We dealt with a number of designers and finally realized we’d need one who catered to this profession,” says Dr. Mason, medical director at EAR.

So, after meeting a representative of Officite at an ENT convention, Dr. Mason decided to work with the patient-oriented company. Two years later, the result is a website that has helped the company reach consumers throughout New England and in some cases across the nation.

“We’ve directed the site toward patient education and more specific information,” offers Dr. Mason. “The information people want to know is usually rather basic, like ‘How do we hear?’ or ‘Why doesn’t my hearing aid work?’”

Dr. Mason attempts to answer those questions in a series of videos that focus on the true measure of a hearing doctor’s ability. The videos, primarily featuring Dr. Mason, have brought EAR attention from locations previously unreachable to a local practice.

“Our job is to make the hearing aid work,” he emphasizes. “It’s the programming that makes all the difference, not the hearing aid itself. You need a programming expert.”

According to Dr. Mason, patients appreciate the straight-forward, easy-to-follow nature of the videos and the emphasis on correct programming. “Most of our patients find us through the website and from the videos in particular,” he adds. “The videos were so popular, we uploaded them to YouTube and we’ve received unprecedented attention there.”

Dr. Mason also credits Officite staff for rapidly adding all his requests to the website. He allows that he can be “very demanding,” but the staff at Officite along with EAR’s own office manager, Jen Sherrod, are able to create the desired result over and over.

As a result, videos are continually added to the website, both in-house and from other sources. For example, Dr. Mason’s wife recently saw a Today Show feature on hearing loss that she felt was particularly well done. When Dr. Mason saw it for himself, he decided to share it with EAR’s patients.

“It was such a well-done piece,” he recalls, “with so much valuable information. So I told the people over at Officite I wanted it added to our site. They made that happen in a matter of hours.”

Another area of importance to the staff at EAR involves reviews from patients who share their experiences at EAR as well as their impressions of the site Dr. Mason and his staff have created. “When I look for websites on a search engine such as Google, I’m not concerned with sponsored links,” he said. “I want to see organic links-where you appear, so to speak, on the page. Our patients are increasingly computer-literate, and we have about a half dozen reviews on Google.”

One such review was completed by a physician who refers his patients to EAR. This particular doctor brought his brother in first and was so happy with the results that he brought in his 80-year-old mother shortly thereafter. “The mom had been rejecting hearing aids for years, but he brought her all the way from Connecticut,” Dr. Mason recalls. “She hadn’t purchased a hearing aid despite her need for one.”

However, Dr. Bozeman was able to put the mother at ease and successfully fit her with a hearing device. For the first time in her life, the woman agreed to use the device regularly.

Dr. Mason estimates that EAR adds a new video to the site every six weeks or so. One reason is to enhance web standing in the organic listing on search engines. “The more content you have on there, the better they like you,” he said with a laugh. “We are really content-based.”

But even more important than search engine results is patient education, the core philosophy of the EAR practice. Increasingly, Dr. Mason sees the Internet as the vehicle that will drive his initiative. “As practitioners in a hearing center, we spend a lot of time on outreach,” he explains. “Only in the past year I have realized the true importance and potential of the web. The future of audiology is through the Internet and the education it can provide.”

In Dr. Mason’s eyes, once a patient is educated on a subject, their comfort level with the practitioner increases as well. “The best thing you can have is an educated patient,” he says. “They ask the best questions, and they understand the challenges that lie ahead.”

Some of his patients are so well-versed in matters of hearing that they will come into an initial evaluation with very technical, medically-based theories of what’s causing their hearing problem. This can lead to some amusing conversations but, in Dr. Mason’s opinion, it benefits both patients and doctor.

“Sometimes they’ll give you their own diagnosis, and we’ll have to say, ‘Well, no, in reality this is the problem.’ But that means they’re paying attention. If they have theories on their condition, that means they’re thinking about hearing.”

By Rob Senior, managing editor at ADVANCE

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