Why Best Practices Are Important In Hearing Care
When you make a cake, you trust that if you follow the instructions to the letter, your cake will come out perfectly. The same goes for a medical provider taking on a patient to diagnose and treat their hearing loss. The patient hopes their provider will follow each step for testing and exhaust all options before giving them a firm diagnosis and treatment plan.
The only way to know if their provider is following all these necessary steps is to have an agreed-upon standard and hold them to it. That standard would then be listed in a guidebook of best practices.
Setting the Standard
The American Academy of Audiology and other organizations have set some best practices for audiologists to follow, and by listing their best practices as an offering, practices can establish that they follow these rules. However, these best practices are mostly medically specific, not specific to patient care and other procedural practices.
For instance, the American Academy of Audiology’s website states that “best practice for hearing aid fitting includes hearing aid verification, which confirms that the output of the device is sufficient to improve audibility, AND aided speech recognition testing, which confirms that improved audibility results in better speech understanding.”
Those are fantastic guidelines, but they don’t give much specific guidance, especially on how the patient should be treated through this process, or what kind of equipment the practice should be using.
Setting the Bar for Clinical and Patient Best Practices
An organization built by expert audiologists, called HearingLoss.com, took the standard to the next level. The folks at HearingLoss.com worked with expert audiologists and established two key areas of evaluation for certification: clinical best practices and patient best practices.
- Clinical Best Practices:
- Patient consultations, hearing examinations, and hearing aid fittings are scrutinized to ensure effectiveness.
- Real Ear Measurement and Test Box assessments are integral components to validate the accuracy of hearing aid programming.
- Annual evaluations are encouraged to monitor and address changes in the patient’s hearing health.
- Patient Best Practices:
- The patient experience, from the moment they walk in the door to ongoing communication, is optimized for satisfaction.
- Practices are expected to offer guidance, empowering patients to make informed decisions about their hearing health.
Within these categories, HearingLoss.com lays out a thorough, comprehensive list of specific policies and procedures each practice needs to make happen in order to meet the standard of “best practices.”
As you can imagine, it takes quite a bit of work to become certified as a practice that can boast all of those attributes. You may ask, how does this benefit patients? Well, in creating this type of certification, HearingLoss.com has surgically removed the guesswork from any hunt for a new hearing care professional.
Did you know that Brooks Hearing Clinic is a HearingLoss.com-certified provider? We don’t like to brag, but yeah … we did that.
As a HearingLoss.com-certified provider, Brooks Hearing Clinic adheres to audiological best practices, ensuring patients receive top-tier care. The commitment includes ongoing training, adherence to guidelines, and the incorporation of advanced technologies to enhance patient outcomes.
In the pursuit of optimal hearing health, selecting a provider who follows best practices is paramount. HearingLoss.com certification serves as a beacon, guiding patients to practices committed to excellence. Brooks Hearing Clinic stands as a testament to this commitment, providing patients with the assurance of receiving exceptional care that exceeds health care standards.
Make sure YOU are getting the best care possible; choose a provider backed by a certification from HearingLoss.com, such as your local hearing experts at Brooks Hearing Clinic.
Want to see what our best practices can do for you? Schedule an appointment with us today.