According to the World Health Organization, approximately 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss. Projections show that number growing to 900 million by 2050. Undiagnosed and untreated hearing loss can have significant effects on someone’s quality of life. Because hearing loss is not visible, people with hearing loss tend to ignore their difficulties, or may not recognize the early stages of hearing loss.
We often hear from clients that they have attempted hearing screening in the past, but conventional approaches have yielded poor results. “No one passes,” they say. This is often because they are screening in noisy conditions and their testing equipment can’t compensate for these environments.
Even during times of near total silence, we will almost always experience some amount of background noise. How well we hear it, and how distracting it may be, depends on its frequency and intensity, as well as our individual hearing ability.
New data just published states that approximately half a billion people - or 6-8% of the global population - suffer disabling hearing loss. It is the most common disability identifiable at birth. And although newborn hearing screening programs do exist in many Canadian provinces and American states, few offer universal school-aged hearing screening programs.
Over the past few months we partnered with a couple of our customers in the Hearing Care Industry to help them with lead generation pilot programs. Specifically, using our self-administered simple hearing screener on an iPad as a method for both collecting names of potentially interested new customers, and pre-qualifying them based on whether or not they presented with some possible hearing loss. I thought you might be interested in some of what we learned.
For many hearing clinics, acquiring new clients means resorting to traditional marketing approaches such as cold calling, email campaigns, print and digital advertising, even television ads. While these are all tried-and-true techniques, they won’t necessarily ensure that all responders are properly qualified. Your efforts may gain you numbers, but if the people who walk through your clinic doors as a result have no problem with their hearing health, then your efforts have just cost you both money and valuable time.
Performing a hearing test requires taking several factors into consideration with one of the most important being the reason for the test itself. With traditional manual audiometers, the configuration is typically determined just prior to, or during testing by the tester using their training and years of expertise to determine the optimal settings for each patient. In this new age of evolving audiometric technology, it is now possible to pre-set one or several specific configurations for automated testing. This can prove particularly useful when testing groups of individuals for a common goal.
Do you know what a Pure Tone Average is? Everybody knows what 20/20 means. 120/80. 3.5–1. If optimal eyesight, blood pressure, and cholesterol ratios are considered common knowledge, why then are so few familiar with Pure Tone Average or PTA? It starts by understanding exactly what it means. Let us explain.
Although newborn hearing screening is performed in many Canadian provinces, few offer universal hearing testing of school-aged children. The American Academy of Audiology recommends hearing screening in preschool, kindergarten, grades 1, 3, 5, and either 7 or 9