Over 1 billion people have some form of hearing loss, which has significant impacts on quality of life and general health. Reaching far beyond sensory impairment, hearing loss is damaging to childhood development and is strongly associated with dementia and other health conditions among older people.

This team collaborated with the Lancet Commission on Hearing Loss to develop and validate a decision modeling framework of hearing loss natural history, diagnosis and treatment across the lifespan, with the ultimate goal of envisioning a world where evidence on the economics of global (and country-specific) hearing healthcare policy is available to and understood by all stakeholders, and where evidence-based economic analyses are incorporated into strategies for reducing the burden of unaddressed hearing loss.

Key findings for 2021-2022 included:

• Development of a framework to identify effectiveness of hearing loss interventions that improve detection and linkage to care
• Analysis of variable follow-up rates on hearing screenings for newborns
• Development of costing strategy to determine recurring and one-time costs for health states
• International validation of decision model outputs against Global Burden of Disease data in India, Chile and Nigeria
• Analysis of most frequently reported barriers to cochlear implant access and use

Addressing the Global Burden of Hearing Loss

Poster by Ethan D. Borre, Haley Cionfolo, Mohini Johri, Kamaria Kaalund, Elizabeth Kayzman, Megan Knauer, Brenna Morley, Minahil Shahid, Juliana Shank, Yajur Sriraman, Jacquelin Vicksman, Emily Xu, Danah Younis, Anna Zolotor, Osondu Ogbuoji and Gillian D. Sanders Schmidler