Aural rehabilitation plan example5/4/2023 ![]() The four key components of customized hearing healthcare.Ĭustomized hearing healthcare (Figure 1) is comprised of four components: ![]() ![]() Rehabilitation is where customized hearing healthcare comes to the forefront.įigure 1. Another way to think about purpose, is to ask how audiologists provide value to their patients: audiologists provide value by performing a thorough assessment of a patient’s hearing and communication needs (American Academy of Audiology, 2006) and then by making recommendations for an appropriate rehabilitation plan. On this preposition, it is the audiologist's purpose to lead their patients toward a clear understanding of their hearing problems and to make recommendations for a customized hearing healthcare plan. Garfield and Levy in their book, Can’t Buy Me Like (2013), argue that great businesses operate from the perspective of purpose. In the infamous words of Steve Jobs, “a lot of times people don’t know that they want until you show them.” Most patients know they want to hear better, but they don’t always know how to make that happen. Instead of engaging with patients as sales people would, audiologists will be much more sucessful by approaching them as purpose-driven hearing healthcare professionals who are willing and able to play a leadership role in addressing their listening challenges. These downsides are reasons for audiologists to recast their role. For example, some patients may perceive a practitioner’s concern and empathy as ploys to get them to buy expensive hearing aids. Moreover, this assumption may impinge upon the bond of trust an audiologist attempts to forge with patients. But the assumption is not without its downside, not the least of which is that the audiologist’s role has been converted into that of salesperson, thereby pitting the audiologist’s practice against the likes of Costco and Sam’s Club, which is like pitting David against Goliath without the happy ending. By selling the patient a pair of hearing aids, the audiologist provides benefit. This isn’t necessarily an incorrect assumption because the majority of people with hearing loss can indeed benefit from amplification, so the recommendation is warranted. When people walk into an audiological practice, a common assumption is that the audiologist’s only recommendation will be for them to buy hearing aids. One Half of the Solution: Customized Hearing Healthcare To demonstrate both of these concepts, I’m going to describe my company, clEAR (customized learning: Exercises for Aural Rehabilitation™), which was founded, in part, by a National Institutes of Health grant, but first, let’s consider the solution itself. One solution is to customize the patient’s hearing healthcare and ensure that the interactions that occur between patient and audiologist are both unique and exclusive. The recommendations no doubt portend changing times and explicitly raise the question, How should audiologists in private practice respond to the shifting climate of hearing healthcare? In the foreseeable future, many potential patients may not engage a hearing healthcare professional but instead opt for that one-time transaction with a store representative or an online service. At the same time, such recommendations have sent a shockwave through the private-practice audiology community, leading many audiologists to engage in collective soul-searching about who they are, what they do, and where they are headed as professionals (e.g., Fabry, 2015 Windmill, 2016 Weinstein, 2016). These recommendations may offer a new lower cost option for the millions of people in this country who have hearing loss but who might not buy hearing aids because of high costs. This device classification would be separate from “hearing aids.” OTC wearable hearing devices would be defined as wearable, OTC devices that can assist adults with mild to moderate hearing loss. The Food and Drug Administration should establish a new category of over-the-counter (OTC) wearable hearing devices. This recommendation was endorsed this year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in their Recommendation #7: Last year, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) recommended that the Food and Drug Administration allow basic hearing aids to be sold over-the-counter so that individuals with hearing loss may purchase them online, at the local pharmacy, or at a big-box store for considerably less money than from an audiologist (PCAST, 2015).
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