Best Practice Guidelines for Bone-Anchored Hearing Solutions

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Answer

Everyone recognizes the need for a best-practice guideline for bone-anchored solutions. If we are to develop a best-practice guideline, the guideline has to be driven by the audiologic community and a professional association such as the American Academy of Audiology (AAA). The industry should not be the driver of certain issues.

Recently there has been some action on this issue. Dr. Michael Valente approached AAA and the Academy has decided to move this forward by setting up a Task Force, chaired by Dr. Valente. The Board at AAA will ask the Chair to appoint stakeholders to the Task Force who will then work on developing a Best-Practice Guideline for bone-anchored solutions. There is a hope that there will be a guideline for adults and another one for children.

These guidelines will be peer-reviewed;the guidelines will go through an internal review within the AAA and then through an external review involving the membership of AAA. Once the guidelines have been reviewed and approved, they will be published as AAA guidelines. That process has been initiated, and we are fortunate to have AAA take it to the next stage.

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Dr. Ravi Sockalingam is the director of clinical research and professional relations for Oticon Medical LLC. A native of Singapore, he completed his training in speech pathology and audiology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia where he also received his PhD in Audiology. As a full time faculty in audiology he had taught and undertaken research in various areas of audiology in Australia, Israel, Canada, China, New Zealand. Prior to joining Oticon Medical LLC in Dec 2010, he was the senior audiologist and manager of audiology communications at Oticon's international headquarters in Smorum, Denmark for three years.