A Brief History of the Hearing Aid Institute.

The Hearing Aid Institute was originally founded in Great Falls, MT in 1944 and has been in operation continuously since. Along with being one of the oldest hearing aid dispensers in our area we have been the largest for many years. Our current active patient base exceeds 7,000 persons.

Hearing Aid Institute has been successful due to the development of a unique service system that allows us to provide complete hearing aid testing and services to patients who are thinly scattered over a very large geographic area in Montana. We do this by establishing completely equipped full service offices in major population centers and supplementing them with monthly service centers in smaller communities. This ensures that a qualified and licensed hearing aid dispenser will be available to hearing impared persons on at least a monthly basis within a convenient distance of even very remote areas. Consultants are equipped with full audiometric testing equipment and all spare parts, supplies and equipment required to service hearing instruments at the service centers or in a patient's home. Additional highly sophisticated equipment such as portable computerized real ear measurement systems and video otoscopy systems are also available to consultants for field use as required. Our service centers are a community service free to all hearing aid patients regardless of what brand of hearing instruments they wear or where they purchased them. Any service that can be performed by the consultant such as adjustments, modification, earmold tubing replacement, cleaning, minor parts replacement, etc. are completely without charge to the patient regardless of the age or warranty status of the instrument. The only time a patient must pay anything for service is when an out-of-warranty hearing instrument has a problem that is serious enough that it has to be returned to the manufacturer or an outside repair lab to be fixed.

Those few patients requiring more extensive testing or having very unusual or difficult problems may be serviced at one of our full service offices.

The approach to providing hearing services is very effective and very difficult to duplicate. It requires the support of a strong and well staffed company both to provide the sheer quantity of sophisticated equipment required and have enough trained consultants to ensure that service center schedule is met reliably and consistently even in times of staff turnover or illness. A service center is of no use unless patients can rely on it. Many smaller companies have tried to imitate this system and have soon failed because of the expense and the time demands of regular field work in addition to maintaining a regular office. Hearing Aid Institute currently operates twenty-three service centers. Some of our service centers have been operating regularly for more than thirty years.

We are not locked into one franchised brand of hearing instruments which gives us the flexibility to fit most major brands of instruments depending upon the patients' needs. Out of concern for quality and reliability we usually only work with the high end of any manufacturer's products or with Starkey/Nu-Ear. Starkey/Nu-Ear is the premium division of the largest U.S. hearing instrument manufacturer and Hearing Aid Institute is the exclusive dealer within our operational area. This attention to fitting only top-of-the-line hearing instruments is essential to our ability to work over a large geographic area without becoming overwhelmed by service from defective or poorly fitting products. Our patients are also much more satisfied with high quality fittings. The hearing aid industry's own statistics compiled by major manufacturers show that the average rate of return for credit rate of new hearing instruments in the United States is twenty one percent. Hearing Aid Institutes's return for credit rate does not exceed five percent which indicates an extremely high level of patient satisfaction.

In addition to hearing testing and our work with hearing instruments, we offer a number of other services to the hearing impaired. Our Battery Mart^TM plan provides our patients with premium hearing instrument batteries at prices less than half that of most retail outlets plus the convenience of mail order if desired. We can provide a full range of assistive listening devices for special needs and we have even provided large area FM wireless systems to the university system of Montana. We have a nationwide toll free patient support number (1-800-331-6009) for anything from ordering batteries to checking on the time and place of the nearest service center. As a community service we provide free hearing screening services and educational presentations for health fairs, retirement homes and special events. We can even provide hearing protection devices such as custom made earplugs for shooters, pilots or musicians.

At Hearing Aid Institute we believe that our methods of operation are well proven over many years of experience and that our combination of high quality products with consistent reliable service over a large area results in hearing help being provided to many people who would not bother to go to the trouble of getting the help they need.

If you would like any additional information about any of the services or products that we offer please feel free to speak with one of our consultants or call 1-800-331-6009 and we will be glad to answer your questions or put someone in touch with you.

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