Cost Effectiveness of Access to Hearing Care: An Analysis of CMS Data
By Barry Freeman, PhD, and Ian Windmill, PhD The past few decades have been dominated by efforts to control healthcare costs while improving affordability and access to quality care. Hearing care is no exception as demonstrated by the reports of the 2016 NASEM Committee on Accessible and Affordable Hearing Health Care for Adults and the…
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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 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…
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The New Healthcare Consumer
“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.…
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Avoiding Clinical Blind Spots with Good Audiology
by Brian Taylor, AuD “Signal & Noise” is a bimonthly column by Brian Taylor, AuD. Over the past two years, since the now infamous PCAST report calling for the creation of a category of products sold directly to consumers, there has been seemingly non-stop chatter and deliberation about the roles and responsibilities of audiologists in…
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