Hearing News Watch

    By David H. Kirkwood WASHINGTON, DC—Consultants commissioned by the American Academy of Audiology (AAA) calculate that allowing Medicare beneficiaries direct access to care from an audiologist would reduce costs by $173.3 million over the next ten years by eliminating duplicative audiological services and unnecessary evaluation and management services. In its report, “Determining Potential Medicare Savings by Streamlining Beneficiary

  BLOOMINGTON, MN—-Are you a hearing healthcare provider who has had a memorable, magical moment when the hearing aid you fitted or the counseling you provided brought joy to your patient? If not, you may be in the wrong profession. But if during your career you have experienced one or ten or 100 such moments that brought a smile to

  PRINCETON, NJ—Blending electronics and biology, scientists at Princeton University have used readily available 3D printing tools to create a functioning “bionic ear” that can detect radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability. In a May 1 news release, John Sullivan of the Office of Engineering Communication at Princeton reported that the primary purpose of the researchers

IOWA CITY, IA—The University of Iowa is making a major commitment to improving access to its facilities for people with hearing loss. As reported last week in Iowa Now, the university’s information web site, an induction loop was recently installed in an 84-seat lecture hall in a medical laboratories building in the College of Medicine. That was the first of

NEW YORK—Visitors to Times Square, which New Yorkers like to call the “Crossroads of the World,” are getting a heavy dose of better hearing messages this month. Siemens Hearing Instruments, Inc., which is headquartered across the Hudson River from New York in Piscataway, NJ, is celebrating May as Better Hearing and Speech month by airing a 30-second hearing loss awareness video

WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. Supreme Court announced on April 22 that it would not hear an appeal of a Federal District Court verdict against the Danish hearing aid manufacturers William Demant Holding A/S and Widex A/S in a patent case brought by Energy Transportation Group. The high court’s decision leaves standing a jury’s $31 million verdict against Demant (which owns Oticon) and

By David H. Kirkwood The National Association of the Deaf, joined by more than 75 other national and state advocacy groups for people with hearing loss, wrote last week to Shaun Donovan
, secretary of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
 (HUD), urging that “quotas” not be imposed on the number of people with hearing loss who can live in

LOUISVILLE, KY—A jury here awarded $7.24 million to a family from Vine Grove, KY, after concluding that Advanced Bionics, a cochlear implant manufacturer, had knowingly sold a defective device that caused severe harm to 6-year-old Breanna Sadler. In their verdict, reached on April 17 in federal court in Louisville, the jury awarded the Sadlers $6.25 million in punitive damages and

BOSTON—Everyone knows about the tragic loss of life caused by the two bombs that exploded last week near the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon. The grievous injuries to scores of spectators, which cost many of them their legs, have also been widely reported. However, it is almost certain that the explosions and the shock waves and noise they

WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has reached settlements with eight health care facilities around the country that it found to be in violation of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements for communicating with people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Most of the cases stemmed from the reported failure of the eight hospitals, medical clinics, nursing homes,