Hearing Economics

This series’ first post introduced William J Baumol’s theory of economic cost disease, manifest in personal service professions’ and industries’ reliance on fixed-time, face-to-face encounters to deliver and perfect the goods.  Generally stated, Baumol’s conundrum is that service wages must rise on the back of stalled productivity while manufacturing labor costs rise naturally on the back of increasing productivity. The

Telecommunications have come a long way since the days of party lines when Ernestine the operator routed calls to the right party while everyone listened in on the line. Forget about HIPAA: privacy wasn’t part of the deal. ID was by oral confirmation (“Yes, I’m the party to whom you’re speaking.”), all done while holding a heavy device to ear

A previous post described Baumol’s “cost disease” as a metaphorical affliction of personal services ranging from hair care to audiology, all requiring face-to-face service delivery. In his book on the topic, Baumol identified the wage market conundrum facing audiology practices that dispense manufactured devices, using an illustrative example of 2% wage increases across the board:   If manufacturing wages rise

Pay no attention to the blunt and horrifying title, a crude attempt to capture your attention. Now that you’re here, please contain your outrage and read on to learn the nature and symptoms of the disease, how the diagnosis was made, and what is prognosticated.   On Disease   In healthcare, practitioners comb the mortal being to identify disease, first

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”  –Charles Darwin (1809)   By Donald Hayes, Ph.D., Director of Clinical Research, Unitron The information age, like the agricultural and industrial revolutions that marked transition periods before it, has provided humanity with new tools. Those tools offer us unique

The patent list continues to lean in on ear devices that use the ear as a conveyor belt for things far beyond what audiologists used to think of as hearing “better.” They raise Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) questions about what “better” may mean as technology continues to unfolds. The following are June’s examples of running the “better”

By Amyn Amlani, PhD According to a recent Forbes report,1 US student loan debt is the second-ranked consumer commitment, trailing only mortgage debt. Several factors2 contribute to the rising costs associated with higher education, such as the cost of instruction (but not faculty salaries), operation and maintenance, student services, and research. For graduate students enrolled in a professional audiology program

Sivantos/Widex Has a Lot of Clout by Any Measure   The M&A of Widex and Sivantos was May’s big news in the hearing aid world. The new entity (name as yet undisclosed) is predicted  take the new Denmark-Singapore headquartered entity to 29% global market share, making it the top player among major hearing aid manufacturers (Bernstein, June 1 20181), ahead

Editor’s Note: Business decision-making requires analytics to steer decisions towards profitability. Over the years, the hearing healthcare market has utilized analytics called key performance indicators (KPIs) as their compass when making business decisions. Given the rapid changes occurring in the hearing healthcare arena, we are learning that some KPIs, which were once considered as barometers to financial gain, are not

By Holly Hosford-Dunn, PhD The Big 6 –soon to be the Big 5— continued patenting hearing aid designs and technologies in April. They were joined in these efforts by South Korean and Swiss companies with challenging names that are new to Hearing Economics. We ask better-informed readers to send us what you know about these two:  Sorynorydotcom Inc. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur