2022 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Virtual Conference
March 13 - 15, 2022
Readability and Quality of Pediatric Diagnostic Audiology Reports
Timely identification of hearing loss, hearing aid fitting, and enrollment in early intervention is critical to the language and educational achievement of children with hearing loss (HL). A potential barrier to the early hearing detection and intervention process is lack of effective written communication between professionals and parents of children with HL. Effective written communication is essential to ensuring that families are connected with the right services at the appropriate time. A lack of effective communication may be related to the health literacy levels of caregivers and/or audiologists’ use of language to describe diagnostic audiology process and outcomes. Previous researchers have shown that addressing the language, content, organization, layout, and visual components of a clinical report will improve patients’ comprehension of hearing health related information. However, little research has focused specifically on determining readability and quality from a large sample of diagnostic clinical reports for infants or young children at the time of a first diagnosis of early HL. The current study seeks to characterize the readability and quality of 389 de-identified diagnostic pediatric audiology reports using retrospective data. Research aims addressed the following questions: 1) What is the readability of the clinical reports? 2) What is the quality of the clinical reports? 3) What is the correlation between the readability and quality of the clinical reports? Data analysis is still in progress and will be completed by March 2022. The long-term goal of this research study is to develop evidence-based strategies to improve written communication both between audiologists and between audiologists and parents of newly identified children with HL.
- Describe the impact of health literacy levels on effective communication.
- Identify strategies to improve readability and quality of pediatric diagnostic reports.
- Evaluate current report templates, formulating improvements to written communication during the diagnostic process.
Poster:
3353554_14976AllisonBuerschen.pdf
Presenter: Elizabeth Walker
Elizabeth Walker, PhD, CCC-A/SLP is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on pediatric aural habilitation, specifically examining malleable factors that relate to individual differences in speech perception and language outcomes for children who are deaf or hard of hearing. For the past few years, she has been an investigator on several NIH-funded research grants, including the University of Iowa Cochlear Implant project, Outcomes of Children with Hearing Loss study, and Complex Listening in School Age Children who are Hard of Hearing.
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Allison Buerschen is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Iowa. She is majoring in Communication Sciences and Disorders with a minor in American Sign Language and a certificate in Disability Studies. She is interested in a career in audiology and is planning to begin an AuD program in the fall of 2022.
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No relevant financial relationship exist.
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No relevant nonfinancial relationship exist.
Dr. Sapp is the head of Pediatric Audiology at UNC Medical Center in Chapel Hill, NC, and the director of the Early Hearing Loss Lab. Her research interests include examining the factors that improve language and social outcomes for children who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing, in particular malleable clinical factors like parent counseling.
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