Improving Patient Engagement with Hearables and PSAPs
With the FDA expected to publish initial guidelines for Over-the-Counter hearing aids as early as this fall, the time is now for audiologists to formulate their product and service strategies for responding to deregulation. My recommendation–as an expert in business strategy and patient engagement, a hearing health advocate, and a person with hearing loss—is that…
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Navigating the Road Ahead, Part 4: What about “Hearing Triage”?
by Errol Davis Pattern recognition can be used to interpret pure tone test results as an essential aspect of a “smart” hearing health system that can sort basic hearing patterns into traditional audiological groups of routine or complex problems. Our software stemmed from many years of experience in audiology and medical clinics which included working…
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OTC Hearing Aids: The View from Persons With Hearing Loss
Nancy Williams, a person with hearing loss who holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and is President and Founder of Auditory Insight, published an informative paper in MedCity News about the trend toward consumerization of health care. She shared excellent insights about this transformation in the wake of the OTC Hearing Aid Act of…
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The Emerging Effectiveness of Self-Fitting Hearing Aids, Part 2
Self-Fitting Hearing Aids: Are They Effective? Fortunately, audiologists at the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL) have been on the forefront of self-fitting hearing aid (SFHA) research. Since 2001, they have published a series of important papers examining the efficacy of SFHAs, many of which have been published at the open access journal, Trends in Hearing.…
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The Emerging Effectiveness of Self-Fitting Hearing Aids: Is the IKEA-ization of Hearing Aids Good for Patients and Clinicians?
Although the FDA has yet to officially codify the Over-the-Counter (OTC) Hearing Aid Act, signed into law in August 2017, one subcategory of amplification device, self-fitting hearing aids (SFHA), has been sold online by a couple of companies for some time. According to published reports, for an amplification device to be classified as a self-fitting…
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Navigating the Road Ahead, Part 3: What is a Mild or Moderate hearing problem?
In Part 3 below, the authors take their forward-thinking views on hearing healthcare, which they shared with readers in Part 1 & Part 2, and apply them to the clinical realm. by Terry Mactaggart and Errol Davis While many will applaud the coming regulatory changes permitting the sale of OTC hearing devices, we need…
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