Audiology Key Performance Indicators in an ENT Practice

The Numbers Don't Lie: Audiology Key Performance Indicators in an ENT Practice: Historically, audiologists did not have the capability to systematically measure any part of their business. Sure, they had a general idea of their return rate, gross margin or annual revenue, but oftentimes it was more of a guess than a cold, hard fact. The daily operation of their practice was left completely to intuition and chance. In fact, leaving the performance of the business to chance was a standard business practice in many practices.Today, due mainly to relatively inexpensive, web-based office management systems, audiologists have a virtual arsenal of data at their fingertips. With a swipe of a finger on their smartphone or the click of a mouse on their laptop, an audiologist can gauge the effectiveness of their latest marketing campaign, or the need to fill their schedule with more patients. In many ways, this ocean of data reflects both a surge in technical sophistication driven by the ever-improving microchip as well as a society preoccupied with lists and numbers. Charts, graphs, stats and other types of numbers are all around us. From tracking your favorite fantasy sports star to following the popularity of your last Tweet, there is no escaping the sheer breadth and depth of data, all of it readily available at our fingertips. Nevertheless, based on our experiences, many audiologists, who have access to heaps of data about their practice either chose to ignore it, or fail to use it to make decisions about their business. Perhaps a failure to act on the abundance of this data is a side effect of having too much information. An example of just how much data can be loaded onto a single dashboard is shown in Figure 1.