Hearing Health Equity Over the Life Course and Promising Solutions
Invited speakers from UTHealth Houston, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Arkansas joined together at the 2024 American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery meeting in a panel discussion of health disparities in pediatric and adult patients.
“We examined disparities arising from life in rural communities, race and ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status and presented approaches to mitigate them,” says Vivian Kaul, MD, a neurotologist and assistant professor at McGovern Medical School who discussed disparities among cochlear implant patients. “Married patients and younger patients tend to opt for the implant more often than unmarried and older patients, even when all are candidates and receive the same counseling. It’s important to counsel these patients on the benefits of a cochlear implant, which include improvement in hearing and localizing sound, understanding speech without lip reading, and the ability to understand phone conversations and watch TV more easily.”
The panelists’ goal was to raise awareness of the issues, alert the health care community, and find ways to improve. In addition to Dr. Kaul, the panelists included Carrie Nieman, MD, MPH, associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who presented an introduction to health disparities and health equity; Matthew L. Bush, MD, PhD, MBA, professor and chair of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, who discussed disparities among older adults and innovative approaches including the use of telehealth; and Susan D. Emmett, MD, MPH, associate professor of otolaryngology and epidemiology and director of the Center for Hearing Health Equity at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, who shared the results of a pilot project she led to offer a less-expensive tympanometry test for diagnosis of otitis media in rural communities.