18th ANNUAL EARLY HEARING DETECTION & INTERVENTION MEETING
March 3-5, 2019 • Chicago, IL
THE ANTONIA BRANCIA MAXON AWARD FOR EHDI EXCELLENCE
The 2019 Antonia Brancia Maxon Award for EHDI Excellence will be presented at the 2019 National EHDI Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. This award honors the life and work of Dr. Antonia Brancia Maxon to promote effective Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI) programs for all newborns, infants, and young children. Dr. Maxon was a pioneer in EHDI programs, beginning with her leadership in the Rhode Island Hearing Assessment Project in the late 1980's. She was one of the first to recognize the feasibility and value of universal newborn hearing screening and was a tireless advocate for connecting screening programs with timely and appropriate diagnosis and early intervention.
Her extensive contributions to creating excellent EHDI programs were abruptly ended by a tragic automobile accident in May of 2007. In memory of her contributions, an Award for EHDI Excellence is presented each year at the National EHDI Meeting to honor an individual who has made outstanding contributions to achieving excellence in EHDI programs nationally or in a particular state or region.
Presentation of the 2019 Antonia Brancia Maxon Award for EHDI Excellence will be made on Monday March 4, 2019 at the National EHDI Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. More about the National EHDI Meeting, including past nominees and recipients can be found below.
John Ted Holloway
I am nominating John Ted Holloway MD for the Maxon award. Dr. Holloway exceeds the noteworthy accomplishments listed for considering a nominee for the Maxon award. Dr. Holloway had the insight to be concerned about hearing in newborns, to establish a program before such was popular, and to set the stage for the present approach to early hearing detection and intervention.
John Ted Holloway enabled the first population-based newborn hearing program in the United States. With funding that he arranged from the state of Georgia, the initial program from 1982 systematically used the "high risk register". Data from his 16-county Southeast Health District in Waycross, Georgia, were the only population-based epidemiologic data about infant hearing, presented at the 1993 at the NIH Consensus Development Conference about newborn hearing. That conference was instrumental to early hearing detection and intervention becoming standard practice.
Because of the leadership of John Ted Holloway, his health district in Georgia now has nearly two generations of organized concern about hearing in newborns and infants. Even in the five years after he retired, the Waycross Health District bettered the Georgia average of percent of newborns screened, and in 3/5ths of those years had lower "refer" rates. His District created an access data base to track and monitor hearing screening and follow-up needs. Other health districts in Georgia replicated that database model.
The accomplishments are all the more remarkable considering the milieu of the Health District, in non-coastal mostly- rural Georgia. It continues being the poorest health district in Georgia. The large majority of births continue to be Medicaid-funded.
My admiration for Dr. Holloway's leadership of the public health aspects of early hearing detection and intervention for the patients in Waycross Health District has increased over the last generation. In 2003 and 2004 when working on my "thesis" for a Master of Public Health, I compared and contrasted follow-up from UNHS (that had begun in Georgia in 2000) of an urban Atlanta hospital having a very high proportion of well-insured deliveries, with Waycross Health District. You have likely anticipated my next words: Waycross' performance was better!
John Ted Holloway was groomed to be a general practitioner. Born and raised in Greenwood County, South Carolina, his father and two brothers were physicians. He attended Wofford College, and completed his MD at Medical University of South Carolina in 1970. He had a 31-year career as district director. Though he officially retired in 2005, his presence continues to be influential in Georgia and beyond.
John Ted Holloway's genuine concern for the well-being of persons, his innate solid common sense, his open mind for new ideas, and his stand-back low-key leadership style contributed toward a better world.