One of the traditional five senses, sound sits in the centre of the sensory experience, helping with equilibrium, balance and focus.
It’s a tiny space occupied by the tiniest of bones in the human body – much like the Ears To You audiology van – driven by Steve and Robyn Reinhardt of St Ives, Sydney.
And when they return to their tiny home office after a hard day’s hearing testing and just can’t focus, well, maybe it’s because something is causing a blockage. Much like a wax build-up in the ear canal.
Death by a thousand papercuts
For Robyn, that pesky oily cerumen was a stack of hardcopy paper files.
“I was just drowning in paperwork and couldn’t find a lot of my documents”, admits the Ears To You office manager. In fact, research shows that nearly 75% of time spent working with paper documents is wasted in searching and filing (Coopers & Lybrand).
“I just wanted to upload everything to my Google Drive, and then access it remotely, whenever I need it. It’s quite an important part of the process”, said Robyn. That process, she explains, is what lead Ears To You to digital records management specialists, Avantix.
It’s like Uber Ears
In a competitive market fuelled by an increasing need to meet customer expectations, Steve and Robyn innovated by removing the need for patients to travel for a consultation.
As an Australian owned and based mobile audiological provider, Ears To You visits homes and workplaces across Sydney, providing audiology services, hearing aids and ear protection. But mobility has its challenges – like having access to important business documents any time of the day, at any location – and therefore becomes a vital business life line.
“We offer advice by a qualified hearing professional at a location that is convenient for you”, says Robyn who, when looking for a document scanning service liked the Google reviews of Avantix and the fact that the costings were very competitive.
“The tipping point was when they gave me the quote”, she laughed. “We’re a very small business so we’ve got to be somewhat conservative on spending.” Also, having spoken to Jim Cohen from Avantix on the phone, seemed to have a profound effect.
“He sounded so lovely, so I had a really good feeling about it.”
Avantix is Australia’s leading information processing provider
Indeed, document scanning wherever it may be – Sydney or the CIA – is often shrouded in mystery. But Robyn maintains, “it was a no fuss process: send us your stuff, we’ll scan it, we’ll send back whatever originals you need, and then we’ll securely destroy the rest.”
Sounds easy enough. But is it safe? Guaranteed? 100%?
Robyn continues, “Everything needs to be confidential so I wanted to go with a company that seemed to understand that and would securely destroy everything uploaded and securely done, so that was the big thing”.
Ears To You approached Avantix to convert all their business documents into a digital format over a series of engagements. This gave the husband-and-wife team freedom to concentrate on the important aspects of the business in the full knowledge that their precious data would be right at their fingertips.
“Between the two of us, it just became a bit overwhelming to manage the digitisation side as well. During Covid-19, I was home-schooling my kids, so scanning was one more thing I just didn’t want to do”, Robyn recalled. “I wasn’t coping”.
Robyn says it was important to expand the digital expertise of Ears To You to remain competitive and to deliver the kind of solutions that has made the business so successful.
“Steve runs three different clinics. Between study, work, kids, we need to outsource some of the back end stuff we can’t manage ourselves, and it’s nice to find a good company that can support you to do that”.
Avantix empowers businesses to realise the benefits of digital information
Medical record scanning aside, Robyn’s motivation for digitisation came from an unlikely voice.
David Attenborough.
“We can do our bit for the environment by moving to a paperless office as much as possible. It is a goal and we’re hopeful to get there but I think we also need to be somewhat practical in the sense that, in order for us to go completely paperless we need to rely on our suppliers and our patients to also be able to be paperless”, whispered Robyn.
Legendary voice-overs aside, Robyn has quickly realised the benefits of another type of conservation: time.
“The amount of time I need to dedicate to documentation is like, one-quarter, based on what it was beforehand. I would say Avantix has been critical in freeing up my time to do things that are more effective for the business. I could be doing other stuff that’s more revenue raising than scanning things, which just chews up so much time”.
Avantix CEO Duncan Lord reiterates, “Our focus is to seamlessly integrate with your existing or planned business processes, without disrupting the way you work. So, transform your paper-based documents into readily accessible electronic images and data today, with Avantix’s document scanning service.”
Avantix specialises in converting traditional paper-based documentation into digital files and is a champion of Ears To You (and David Attenborough) and their journey towards full digitalisation.
