Today’s ever-present focus on doing more with less – less people, less money, less capital equipment and less hassle – exists in every business, but especially in healthcare. In the hearing care business, hospitals, physicians’ offices and private practice owners face these challenges too as they strive to serve more patients with hearing loss in satellite clinics and multiple office locations.
A shift is happening in Occupational Hearing Conservation. Many of you have embraced this change since the beginning. You can attest to how tablet audiometry – and SHOEBOX specifically – is helping you be more flexible while saving you time and money on your program and on the services that you provide your clients.
Hearing conservation is big business. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 22 million Americans are exposed to hazardous noise levels on the job annually, making noise-induced hearing loss one of the most common work-related injuries. Protecting workers’ existing hearing and training them to take personal responsibility for their hearing health is an important part of hearing conservation but testing hearing at required intervals and monitoring for changes in hearing levels is equally important.
Hearing loss is an invisible disability and as such, it is hard to recognize without proper screening. However, the improvements made by treatment are so dramatic that it is well worth the effort to identify appropriate patients. Out of the 2,100 children screened over 10 days on this mission, 34 were identified with hearing loss and 12 were candidates for further hearing rehabilitation. There is no question that their lives have been positively altered as a result.
This article is a short Q & A session with our in-house Audiologist, Renée Lefrançois. Today, we are discussing Assisted Mode testing using SHOEBOX Audiometry. SHOEBOX is the first clinically validated iPad Audiometer, and the only one to offer Assisted Mode testing.
REACT, a patent-pending technology available only in SHOEBOX Audiometry ensures test accuracy by continuously monitoring for conditions such as patient response behavior and environmental conditions. The dynamic reactions replace the manual adjustments the audiologist would make during testing.
