An Audiology Program to Proactively Manage Inpatient Veterans With Hearing Loss

Effective communication is essential to optimize medical care, but patients and providers are poor at recognizing hearing difficulty. While hearing loss is managed in outpatient clinics at the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System, audiologic care for inpatients is typically reactive or not provided.

An audiology inpatient management (AIM) program was developed to improve communication between inpatients with hearing loss and their medical providers during a hospitalization. AIM uses chart review to proactively identify inpatients that may have difficulty communicating with medical providers and provides bedside audiologic care. AIM was piloted on one inpatient unit before expanding to the entire medical center.

Fifty-two percent (52%) of the pilot unit's new admissions had previously documented hearing loss. Although 83% of inpatients with hearing loss were fitted with hearing aids before their hospitalization, only 31% brought them to the hospital upon admission. Since expanding AIM to every inpatient unit, 28% of all new hospital admissions received audiologic care at bedside.

This article describes AIM's design, implementation, and evaluation with the intent of serving as a resource for other audiologists creating a similar program. Audiologists must guide recommendations on how to ensure that inpatients with hearing loss can effectively participate in their health care.