Ascent Audiology & Hearing – McLean

Excellent and Outstanding Service.
Whenever I drive in the car with my wife, I can’t hear her. We tried Costco, but no one followed up with me. When I received the mailing from Ascent, it was close to our house, so we went to see Dr. Anzola. She explained the process and after the hearing test, she said I did need hearing aids and that I would get a follow up for a whole year. I needed an adjustment on the right hearing aid and I found the follow up excellent. I am very glad I went to Dr. Anzola. I, also, found the office help excellent.

Despite all of the accolades and so-​called awards that Dr. Anzola and Ascent Audiology have racked up over the years, if you are able to avoid this hearing aid retailer, I would.
Although Dr. Anzola is enthusiastic in her approach to treatment, she is not really interested in a dialogue with her patients. Answers to questions, especially questions about billing, are evasive and often consist of long explanations that may, or may not, even pertain to the question being asked.
Dr. Anzola is also not particularly careful when it comes to fitting and adjusting hearing aids once they’ve been acquired. Twice, first on the initial fitting and then again on my return visit for tuning and programming, Dr. Anzola allowed other patient business to interrupt her work. The first time this resulted in my being left for 5 minutes in her office while a loud, high-​frequency test tone blared in my left ear. Her explanation when she returned and I complained was, «…well that shouldn’t have happened.» *DUH*! Not only should it not have happened, but perhaps also the doctor should not have left the office in the middle of a test. The second time, Dr. Anzola’s enthusiasm for programming my hearing aids for particular acoustic conditions, resulted in having two different hearing programs assigned at the same time… one in my left ear and one in my right. This resulted in vertigo that I had to put up with for one miserable day before I simply abandoned the use of my hearing aids for the 4 days it took me to get back to her office to have her mistake corrected.
But perhaps most egregious are Ascent’s billing practices. After giving up on Dr. Anzola’s office and obtaining my hearing aids elsewhere (same model and brand), I discovered that Ascent Audiology significantly inflates their costs before submitting to insurance. Dr. Anzola explains this as «value-​added services», but then applies similar mark-​ups to optional equipment for which there is no «value-​add». Had I stuck with Ascent Audiology, I would have ended up with pricing more than 20% higher than was ultimately billed to my insurance by my alternate provider. (In one case, on an item not covered by insurance, the cost would have been 150% higher.) You can draw your own conclusions on why an audiology office would inflate their costs when they are, by contract, required to accept the insurance carrier’s cost determinations. But I’ll also note that about a month after I returned my hearing aids, I received an «Explanation of Benefits» from my insurance carrier. Ascent Audiology had billed my insurance carrier for a second set of hearing aids – products that were never dispensed – on the same day that I returned the first pair and terminated my relationship with that office.
Go somewhere else.