Dr. Cliff Olson, Audiologist and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Anthem Arizona, discusses why he had to leave TruHearing.

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TruHearing is a third party managed care program that contracts with insurance companies to control costs. TruHearing negotiates a specific amount of reimbursement from insurance companies combined with some costs being passed on to patients.

Working with TruHearing is relatively easy. They have an interactive website to order devices and verify insurance benefits. They have a good variety of good hearing aids to choose from, and the entire process is streamlined nicely from patient scheduling to hearing aid fitting.

The only problem was, ever time a TruHearing patient came to the clinic, we would lose money. TruHearing only pays a small fitting fee to hearing care providers. Additionally, TruHearing limits follow-up charges to only $65 per visit or $250 for an annual service plan.

This sounds great if you are a patient, but if a clinic can't cover the cost of doing business it will go out of business. Clinics need to pay rent, staff, utilities, and equipment costs among other expenses. When these costs exceed reimbursement rates from TruHearing, each visit a patient makes increases the risk of a clinic going out of business.

So unless I was willing to significantly reduce time spent with patients and dramatically reduce quality of care, I could not stay a TruHearing Provider.

I don't say this to speak poorly of TruHearing. There may still be good hearing care providers who are a part of the TruHearing network. I just couldn't afford to be one of them.

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