Question
How has the Starkey Hearing Care Anywhere telehealth program been enhanced?
Answer
The global pandemic has changed many things about the way we live. This includes how hearing healthcare is delivered. Thankfully, Starkey has enhanced its remote programming capabilities with the latest release of the Starkey Hearing Care Anywhere technologies as part of the Thrive Hearing Control App. As a reminder, this technology allows hearing aid wearers to request adjustments to their hearing aids from their hearing care professional - without needing to make an appointment or come into the office. Simply put, this makes hearing care convenient and easy to use.
For the asynchronous approach, wearers open the Thrive Hearing App, create a help request and send it to their hearing care professionals. This request is stored securely in the cloud. Once the hearing professional receives the request, they make the required adjustment and then send the new settings back to the wearer. The wearer can pull those adjustments down from the cloud whenever it is convenient for them, listen to the changes and compare them to their old settings and save whichever setting are providing the best listening experience.
Hearing Care Anywhere and remote programming has become a very popular feature because of the pandemic as we all reinvent ways in which we deliver hearing care to our patients. At Starkey, we were able to enhance this technology to include a mechanism for Live Sessions in which the hearing care professionals and the patient can leverage video chat to make real-time changes to the hearing aids via Synchronous Remote Programming.
The Live Sessions component of Hearing Care Everywhere is available to people wearing Livio Edge AI, Livio AI or Livio devices using the most recent update to the Thrive mobile app. Professionals will need the new Inspire 2020.1 and have a Hearing Care Anywhere Dashboard set up. With these things in place, using Live Sessions for a real-time, synchronous remote programming session is as simple for the user as doing a video chat from their smartphone!
This Ask the Expert is an excerpt from Inspire and Hearing Care Anywhere: The Best Programming Software Just Got Better! For more information, visit www.starkey.com or visit Starkey's Partner Page on AudiologyOnline.
