Other Services
Hearing Instrument Consultation
Before you purchase a hearing device, it is extremely important that the choice in hearing instruments is made jointly between you and one of our hearing healthcare providers. It could take as much as an hour to learn about you, your listening requirements, your expectations and your budget and closely match your needs with the most suitable products. Without a proper consultation, you may not fully reach the maximum potential of your residual hearing. You will be investing a substantial amount of time, effort and money for your sound experience. Rest assured that the Advanced Group of Clinics will make it happen.
Trial Period
If you access one of the government funded hearing instrument programs you have to receive a minimum of 60 days in which you can try your hearing instruments without a complete commitment. If for any reason you decide hearing instruments are not right for you, you can return them to Advanced Hearing Aid Clinic (a return fee will apply). Advanced Hearing Aid Clinic offers you a 60 day trial period and should you need more time than 60 days for whatever reason, the trial period is flexible and can be extended.
Hearing Instrument Fitting
Your hearing aid fitting will begin with programming of your new hearing instruments, followed by Real Ear Measurements or digital speech mapping and concluding with in depth counseling on the care, maintenance and proper use. By the end of the fitting, the hearing instruments will be fully customized for you and you will have been introduced to the daily care and maintenance of your new devices.
Short-Term Follow-Up
You may be overwhelmed at the fitting appointment and forgot 90% of what you learned. Don’t worry, that is why you have follow-up appointments. Expect 2 to 3 follow-up appointments during your trial period so that we can ensure that you are maximally benefiting from your devices. We will use these appointments to fine tune our very precise programming and may need to do additional measurements to better suit you. Once you try your new hearing instruments in your own environment you may realize that some things need tweaking. A good audiologist will be able to ask you a multitude of questions about your new hearing and make intelligent and effective decisions during reprogramming. Remember, each person has individual requirements. Some people may call and cancel their follow-up appointments because they are very satisfied right from the beginning while others require more than 3 follow-up appointments simply because they want to be certain they have learned everything about their hearing instruments to sufficiently care for them. In any case, your after purchase care will be custom tailored for you.
Long-Term Follow Up
Patients with hearing devices should return to one of the clinics every three months for a comprehensive cleaning of their hearing instruments with our specialized cleaning equipment. Most hearing devices purchased through one of our clinics come with a standard three year manufacturers warranty, so these appointments are covered for the duration of the warranty period. Annual hearing assessments are recommended to monitor the status of your hearing thresholds, or sooner if there are perceptual changes in hearing levels. Manufacturers routinely update their programs for hearing devices. It is important that individuals take advantage of these updates to ensure they are optimally benefiting with their devices.
The New Model of Hearing Health Care at the Advanced Clinics
The Advanced Group of Clinics is set to begin a new model of addressing the needs of our adult hearing impaired patients, based on the recommendations of Dr. Robert Sweetow of UCSF Medical Center. "Hearing Aid Evaluations" will be geared more towards full Communication Needs Assessments in order to fully understand the communication demands of each individual patient, thus taking our services beyond simply addressing the hearing test and word recognition scores in quiet. We aim to incorporate both subjective and objective assessments in order to best determine what our primary goals will become. "...Communication, the ultimate objective for our patients, encompasses not only hearing, but listening skills, cognitive-based interpretation, and communication strategies. Hearing aids may (or may not be) one of the components of an overall rehabilitation plan, but a rehabilitation plan is not a component of hearing aids. In other words, the current tendency to supplement hearing aid fittings with additional therapy is misguided. Instead, hearing aids should supplement the global plan of communication treatment....By offering this holistic approach, patients can recognize that it is not just the ears that the audiologist is treating and that limitations in their hearing systems do not restrict them to a life of communication difficulty" (Dr. R. Sweetow). In other words, our team will help you to hear better, but other procedures may be required for you to listen better. We will introduce these additional measures to you in subsequent follow up appointments.
Listening and Communication Enhancement (LACE)
The Advanced Group of Clinics will offer LACE (Listening and Communication Enhancement) therapy, an interactive, computerized proven aural rehabilitation program, to further supplement our patients' continued development of auditory skills. This will be accessible to all those with hearing loss/hearing devices, in addition to those with other auditory processing difficulties such as hearing in the presence of background noise (Auditory Figure Ground), auditory memory, and other higher-level processing that can impact ease of communication.