HLAA Convention 2011 Special: Exhibits #12

[Guest guest]

NVRC News - July 5, 2011

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HLAA Convention Exhibits #12 - EARTtrak exhibit and demo

By Bonnie O'Leary, 7/5/11

EARtrak Exhibit

I was so pleased to see that EARtrak took an exhibit at the HLAA convention

this year and provided a short program in the Demo Room about their

services. (There is a personal back story I would like to share about

EARtrak at the end of my report.) I spoke with their Director, Neil

Clutterbuck and his wife Sue, who is Vice President of Research and Clinic

Studies.

Neil and Sue are both audiologists from Melbourne, Australia - talk about a

long flight to Washington! Neil has served as President of the Australian

Association of Audiologists in Private Practice, and is on the International

Committee of the American Academy of Audiology. founded Gippsland

Audiology Services in 1983, and Neil serves as its Director. Their clinic

has a main office and two satellite offices outside of Melbourne.

Neil and Sue founded EARtrak in 2005 as an independent system for measuring

consumer opinion about the effectiveness of hearing care. The company's

mission is " giving consumers a voice in advancing standards of hearing aid

care. " They believe that the skill and professionalism of the audiologist

plays the largest part in the successful outcome of hearing aid use, and so

their system tracks the success rates of audiology practices. Currently,

EARtrak has expanded to New Zealand and Germany, and the hope is the system

will become popular here in the U.S.

Here's how it works: Through a survey, EARtrak collects the opinions of

those who have experienced the purchase and wear of hearing aids from

professional dispensers. These opinions form the basis for EARtrak's rating

of the performance of audiology clinics.

If you want to share your opinion about your hearing aids and the clinic

where you were served, you can complete an online survey at www.eartrak.com

or you can print a copy from the website, fill it in, and send it to HLAA,

7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 1200, Bethesda, MD. 20814. Many visitors to

the EARtrak exhibit picked up surveys to fill in for HLAA and expressed a

keen interest in being able to let someone know about their hearing aid

experiences.

The results of the surveys are then posted to the EARtrak website, where the

clinics receive a rating of 1 to 5 stars. Consumers can then select a

clinic based on the reported satisfaction of other hearing aid wearers.

At NVRC, we get many calls throughout the year from people who are losing

their hearing and want to know where to find a good audiologist. EARtrak's

goal is to become the online resource to help find that good audiologist.

Visitors to the EARtrak exhibit at the HLAA conference expressed excitement

about the concept and hoped that it would catch on here in the States.

EARtrak Demo

I attended Sue Clutterbuck's demo, " Consumer Driven Improvement in Hearing

Care: a New Approach " . Sue cited the 2009 Consumer Reports article about

hearing aids, and a 2010 MarkeTrak VIII study on the impact of the hearing

care professional with a quote from MarkeTrak's Founder, Sergei Kochkin:

" Data from this study suggest that quality control at the point of

dispensing has not kept pace with the industry's rapid technological

improvements. "

EARtrak (which was inspired by Sergei Kochkin's MarkeTrak) was founded to

rate the quality of the services provided by the dispensers. Everyone

attending the demo had to fill in the two-part survey. The first part was

personal information about ourselves, and the second was the customer

satisfaction portion. These surveys would then be sent to HLAA, where they

would then be forwarded to EARtrak to enter the results in the EARtrak

database.

To demonstrate how EARtrak works, Sue asked us to pretend that we were all

patients of ABC Clinic, and that all of our surveys were for that Clinic.

EARtrak would log our opinions into their database, then generate a report

for ABC Clinic, comparing their performance against a benchmark group, and

assign a rating of up to 5 stars. The Clinic would then be able to see

how well they are doing, where their problems are, and what they need to do

to fix them and become a better clinic. The quality accreditation ratings

are: Independent audit of service quality, continuing commitment to quality

improvement, patient satisfaction with hearing improvement, patient

satisfaction with device performance, and patient satisfaction with service

delivery.

The ultimate goal is that consumers seeking hearing care will be able to

access EARtrak independent performance ratings when choosing a service.

Clinics will work harder to maintain high star ratings to attract and retain

patients. Consumers will receive more effective hearing services. In

addition, manufacturers will see enhanced dispensing performance from their

devices, and consumer organizations will have access to a large

informational database when lobbying for improvements in hearing care. And

finally, improved community confidence in the effectiveness of hearing

devices will improve the uptake of hearing care.

To learn more or complete a survey, visit www.eartrak.com or

outcomes@....

Bonnie and Neil.jpg

And now the back story..in 2005, I participated in an e-interview with a

journalist from The Washington Post who was doing an article about hearing

aids. That issue of The Washington Post ended up in Neil and Sue's office at

Gippsland Audiology Services, their clinic. After reading the article, Neil

contacted me by email to introduce himself and their new company, EARtrak,

and an e-friendship developed over the next several months. When Neil came

to the States in 2006 for a conference, I brought him to NVRC, and he met

the staff at an informal dinner gathering so we could talk about our

Resource Center, hearing loss issues in general, and EARtrak in particular.

During the past 6 years we have stayed in touch, but I don't get to

Australia, and their return visits to the States have been to conventions on

the other side of the country. It was wonderful to see Neil again, to

finally meet Sue, and to enjoy a 4-hour dinner with them at the Chesapeake

Grill on the last night of the conference. Here we are in the photo Neil,

me and Sue!)

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