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What to Know About Hearing Aid Outcomes

Hi, I’m Dr. Egan from Now Hear This® and today I’m going to talk to you about the importance of measuring hearing aid outcomes. So, at our clinic, when someone has hearing loss, if hearing aids are the right solution for them, they go through the hearing aid fitting process. They’re programmed with something called Real Ear Measurement. They’re seen several times after to make sure that everything sounds good, the hearing aids are fitting well on their ears, and anything else we might need to do to get their brain adapted to hearing the sounds that they were missing. 

At that point, we go through our patient’s listening goals. What were the original things they came into our clinic saying they were struggling with. And after that, we do outcome measurements in the form of survey. So, there’s a survey called the Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults and it gives you a percentage that tells you how much hearing loss handicap someone has. 0-16% would mean that someone has pretty much no perceived hearing loss handicap. 18-42% would mean that they have a mild to moderate handicap from their hearing loss. If they have 44% or more, it means they have a significant perceived hearing loss handicap that they are struggling with in their day-today lives. 

So, if you think about it, the goal with hearing aids and proper hearing intervention, would be to reduce the amount of percentage, so that they have as little handicap with their hearing loss as possible. I’m excited to share with you that in our most recent 20 patients who came through and completed the Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults, we had an average of 3.5% or essentially no perceived hearing loss handicap after intervention. This is fabulous because our goal and my day-to-day goal and passion are to help patients hear their best. So, doing these surveys keeps me accountable to make sure that I am doing everything I can to help my patients, and it’s always great to see that they feel they are being helped. So, 3.5% you know, they’re pretty much they might struggle here and there, but 97% of the time they are not having any difficulty. That’s truly what we want for all our patients. I hope you learned a little bit from this video today, and of course, have a wonderful rest of your day!