The Metaphor Monologues: Treatment Options for Chronic Cost Disease of Hearing Healthcare
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…
Read More
US Ear Device Patents in July 2018
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…
Read MoreThe Metaphor Monologues: Unhealthy Practices
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:…
Read MoreThe Metaphor Monologues: Hearing Healthcare Has a Chronic Disease
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…
Read More
US Ear Device Patents in June 2018
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…
Read More