Question
What drove the development of the new bone-anchored hearing system (BAHS) simulated test protocol?
Answer
The goal of the bone-anchored hearing system (BAHS) test protocol is to create a simple test protocol for audiologists using the resources available within their clinic that allows them to provide best practices for their patients and bill for their services.
As we were going through the development of creating this protocol, we did a literature review and we wanted to look at, what's been done out there as an established protocol for bone-anchored patients. And what we found is that there was very little published research on existing protocols and if they existed, they tended to be very long and would take a lot of time for a busy clinic to administer. There wasn't anything concisely packaged in a very clinic-friendly protocol or process. And so that's what really prompted this idea of creating a protocol.
In doing our research to develop this protocol, we investigated work done by Snapp and colleagues on the clinical utility of speech and noise testing as part of the preoperative evaluation. The results of this study supported the use of speech and noise measurements as an accurate predictor, of overall benefits in patients with single-sided deafness prior to implantation.
This Ask the Expert is an excerpt from Evaluating BAHS Benefit During the Patient Trial Process: A NEW Test Protocol from Oticon Medical. For more information, visit oticonmedical.com/us or visit Oticon Medical's Partner Page on AudiologyOnline.