MM302 - Leveraging Health System Priorities to Increase Hearing Health Awareness and Improve the Patient Experience

Despite the clinical and financial impact of HL, accessible management solutions, and emphatic calls to action, 75% of hearing loss remains under-diagnosed and under-treated. It is estimated that by 2050 2.5 billion people worldwide will have hearing loss. Whether they identify and treat their hearing loss or not, those individuals are all accessing other healthcare services – and their untreated hearing loss has negative consequences on many aspects of both their health and healthcare experience.

Recent evidence in the literature highlights the impact of unmanaged hearing loss on healthcare costs, compliance with provider recommendations, perception of care (including patient-provider communication), hospital readmissions, post-operative complications, and likelihood of having and maintaining a regular source of care.

At the same time, healthcare organizations are embracing patient-centered care models, struggling to address health equity, striving to increase safety, quality, and patient experience (SQPE) metrics, and addressing payer requirements that determine reimbursement based on value-based care. Metrics that capture patient perception, e.g., the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and System (HCAHP) scores and benchmarked SQPE outcomes are both meaningful and influential, and therefore high priority for health systems.

Audiologists, particularly those working in academic medical center and hospital system settings, have an unprecedented opportunity to increase our visibility and influence by deploying strategic interventions that aim to improve patient experience and health equity outside of our practices. These efforts can serve the dual purpose of (1) driving improvement for those health outcomes that are correlated with unmanaged hearing loss and (2) increasing awareness of hearing loss, our services, and their positive impact which may have the indirect benefit of increasing referrals to our care. Most importantly, these results can be obtained for patients who have yet to set foot in our practices.

Our large, established academic medical center is taking a multi-pronged approach to influencing the experience of patients with hearing loss across our healthcare system. Tactics have included measures such as developing and deploying a video documenting the healthcare experience of those with hearing loss, designed to empathetically engage the hearts and minds of caregivers across the health system who may have been previously unfamiliar with hearing loss and its impact; distribution of communication strategies and best practices; engagement of partners in primary care, geriatric medicine, clinical transformation (safety, quality, patient experience, access); and strategic internal and external media communications, among others.

This session will describe how we have engaged non-audiologist leaders across the system to engage in problem-solving to improve the experience for patients with hearing loss, review the literature that has underscored our strategy, highlight successful tactics, and share preliminary outcomes in terms of enhanced relationships and visibility for our program and the importance of hearing as a key aspect of health. Most importantly, we’ll highlight how the benefits of this work are shared across audiology, other clinicians working with patients with hearing loss, the healthcare system, and patients themselves.