MED-EL Remote Care: Supporting CI Patients Beyond the Clinic Visit

Welcome to This Week in Hearing. I’m Shari Eberts, and today’s guest is Dr. Kensi Saia, a former clinical audiologist and now product manager at MED-EL US, where she is dedicated to developing leading-edge technology that restores hearing and empowers connection. She is also MED-EL’s resident expert on Remote Care, which is a new telehealth platform for audiologists and has a companion HearCare app for CI recipients, and this new system empowers hearing care professionals and their patients to connect, share data, and manage care outside of the clinic. So thank you, Kensi, for being here today. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. So let’s just start with the big picture. What types of challenges were you seeing in cochlear implant care that made Remote Care such an important innovation for MED-EL? We are continually consulting with clinicians to help us better understand what their needs are, how we can partner with them, support them, and provide better outcomes for their patients, and I’d say over the last couple of years, a couple of really common themes have kept emerging when we ask them, like, “What are your goals for the clinic this year?” They really want to improve access to hearing healthcare and to cochlear implants, and they also want to maximize their clinic’s efficiency, and that can be a hard balance to want to bring more people through the door and provide them really high-quality care but still maintain a really efficient clinic flow and not sacrifice on the time that you have for each of these patients, and so I think that that’s exactly where something like telehealth and Remote Care come into play. The MED-EL approach to Remote Care is designed to really give audiologists flexibility in how they connect with their patients. It allows them to connect to different patient populations than they may have in the past, especially those who might not live close to a cochlear implant center and might struggle to get there very frequently. It also gives them a new type of touchpoint with their existing patients so that they’ve got an alternative to a scheduled in-person visit. They can do maybe a quicker Remote Care visit instead and really meet their patients where they’re at, and then in turn, they can prioritize those in-person visits for patients that really need them, for visits that can’t be accomplished remote, and so we’re really excited to offer people a way to have a flexible opportunity to tailor the cochlear implant journey to meet their needs. Well, it sounds wonderful. What do you think the impact will be just on the way clinicians think about their care for patients? And you’ve talked about some of the main features already, but are there certain things that are really gonna stand out as the clinicians think about patient care? So one thing about MED-EL, we feel very strongly about individualization, so we really like to pay attention to the uniqueness of each person, of each cochlea, and of each cochlear implant journey, and we want people to think about Remote Care the same way. We want them to think, “How can I take these tools that are available to me and find a way to use them that suits my needs the best? How can I lighten my daily load in-clinic or in my daily life?” And for us, the crux of that really comes with the HearCare app. That’s how audiologists can make their connections with patients, but it’s also a standalone option to give patients more control over their own hearing journey, and what that looks like is they have the ability to do system checks. So anytime, anywhere, they can pull their phone out of their pocket and run a check of both their internal device and also their external device to just get that added peace of mind. It could be a parent that does this every day to make sure that their baby’s equipment is working if that’s what makes them feel better. It could be someone that’s had an accident or a head injury or they’re feeling sick and they’re just not sure that everything is what it needs to be. They can run a quick system check and get that peace of mind. That is a really nice option for patients to be able to do from home, because when I was in-clinic, I would have people that were maybe concerned that things weren’t working right, and they would have to come all the way to clinic for me to run the test. For them to be able to do this from home now is a huge time-saver for both the patient and the audiologist. We also have the option for patients to back up their mapping data to a secure cloud, and what that allows them to do is store everything there for a rainy day. If their processor needs to be replaced, they can reach out to MED-EL, we can ship a processor replacement directly to them, and then they just pull that data from the cloud onto their new processor in a matter of seconds. It makes us more efficient because we don’t have to wait for the audiologist to get that information to us. So it provides us an opportunity to get processors to patients faster than we have before and to remove some load from the audiologist. Now, we also give flexibility to caregivers. They have a guardian role, so they can assign, let’s say, their teachers, grandparents, nurses different levels of permission. So if the primary caregiver is not there, then they have the ability to take over control and run all of these system checks for the recipient. So what has the reaction been from clinicians about this? Because this is really taking a lot of the management of the patient experience from a clinician and giving it directly to the consumer. What’s the reaction been to that? It’s a balance that we want to achieve. One of the things that we like to do is to help support clinicians as much as we can on our end, especially with things that maybe are not billable hours for them, like troubleshooting calls on the phone with a patient. It allows us to give some of that information to the patient on the front end so that we can help them care for their equipment while the audiologist deals with perhaps things that need to be dealt with more in-person, like really complex troubleshooting or programming in-person. And it’s meant to lighten their load. It’s meant to give them one less task to have to tend to at the end of the day. The response has been positive so far from clinicians. I think they really like being able to offer their patients one more tool for peace of mind by being able to tell them, “Hey, you can run your own system check.” So it’s kind of a nice combination of us and them working together. We also have the option for clinics to use Remote Care software within their Maestro Programming Software, and that unlocks even more doors. It allows them to really take the HearCare app up a notch in that they can then view all of the data that the patient’s been storing in their HearCare app. So any of these system checks that have been running or any data that the patient’s backed up, the audiologist can open their Maestro software and see it, download it, review it to help them figure out do they need to get this patient in in-person if they’re having concerns. They can also send them questionnaires if they wanted to get a better understanding of the patient’s sound quality. And then if they decide that changes do need to be made, then they can, if possible, engage with that in a virtual call with the patient and send those changes through the HearCare app without them having to come to clinic, or let them know they still need to come in. So they still have a lot of control, but we’re giving them options for how they approach the management of their patients and determining what needs to be seen in-person versus what can be done virtually.