Transcript:
Well, if you live in northern Maryland you’ve come to the right place. If you live in California, you might want to keep looking – or give us a call and we’ll point you in the right direction. There’s a lot of different options out there for people with hearing loss.
On one extreme, you have small retail outlets inside department stores and their purpose is to sell hearing aids – sometimes there right next to the lingerie section. And if you’re looking for a one-stop solution where you can buy your underwear and hearing aids in the same trip that might be an excellent option for you.
On the other side, you have research hospitals who have entire audiology departments and who specialize in surgeries such as cochlear implants, middle ear implants – options for people with more severe hearing losses or rarer types of hearing loss.
Well when I opened Harmony Hearing, I wanted to provide the ideal patient experience and clinical environment for most people with hearing loss and I didn’t want to be just another listing in the audiology section of the YellowPages, so we do things here a little bit differently.
The approach we take with new patients is three-fold.
First, we always perform a comprehensive, diagnostic hearing evaluation – this is not a free hearing test. It’s typically billed to your health insurance and we dive pretty deep in to determine the type of hearing loss that you have, the degree of hearing loss, and we also roll out any underlying medical conditions that may need to be addressed.
Secondly, we discuss the results with you – we educate you about your hearing loss. We show you what’s going on with your ears, how it impacts daily communication, and why it impacts your life the way that it does.
And thirdly, we discuss possible solutions. If a hearing aid is appropriate, we can actually program real hearing aids, put them on you, program them for your specific hearing loss, and let you experience what it would be like to wear hearing aids. That way you can decide for yourself if you think it might be something that would help you out in your day-to-day life.
We accomplish all of this through the use of cutting-edge technology that we’ve networked together and we call it HarmonyLIVE. HarmonyLIVE incorporates computer software, video equipment, and a surround-sound audio system.
It allows patients to better understand their hearing loss and it allows us to program hearing aids much more accurately – resulting in patients who actually love their hearing aids. For example, if you come in and you say you’re having difficulty in a place with a lot of background noise, such a restaurant, we will stimulate a restaurant environment.
We can look at what the hearing aids are doing, make actual measurements from inside your ear, and make adjustments accordingly. It’s not rocket science we’re just leveraging the power of technology and it works. So, if you’re experiencing some degree of hearing difficulty, the first step is to come in for a hearing evaluation.