MEASURING RESULTS

Let’s face it. Hearing aids are helpful, but they can be frustrating too. Over the last 10 years, we have collected reports from patients about how their hearing aids have been helpful and about the things they have found frustrating too. The most common of these comments have been incorporated into a scale which is useful for measuring success with hearing aids and for fine tuning hearing aid fittings. This scale is termed the H-F Diff. H stands for helpfulness and F stands for frustration. Diff stands for the difference between them.

Image courtesy of Oticon

The scale contains approximately 30 questions about the helpfulness. Patients rate helpfulness on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 = to no help whatsoever, and 10 = to as much help as they had hoped to receive from amplification, ie. meets every expectation. Some of the questions are:

How helpful are your hearing aids:
at home, in general?
for lecturers or religious worship?
in background noise?

The best helpfulness score is equal to 10.

Then the scale asks approximately 30 questions about frustrations. This time, zero is = to no frustration whatsoever and 10 = so much frustration that the hearing aid is not used in that situation. Some of the questions are:

How frustrated are you by:
whistling from your hearing aids?
chewing sounds?
loud background noise?
difficulty putting them in and adjusting them?

The best frustration score is = 0, ie. absolutely no frustrations whatsoever. See our patients' average helpfullness and frustration scores.

Then we go over the results and fix the things we can, or discuss those that we can’t. When results have been optimized, the helpfulness and frustrations scores are averaged and the averaged frustration score is subtracted from the averaged helpfulness score. The difference (Diff) is recorded.

If the patient has a high positive Diff, we have a good result, if the Diff is negative, then usually the hearing aid is returned or we still have more work to do.

The Diffs are incorporated into an overall distribution and then the patient’s results are compared with the Diffs of the other patients in practice. See the range of Diffs of our patients.

See how hearing aids help our patients with noise.

See Average Helpfulness Ratings of our patients (broken down by category).

See Average Frustration Ratings of our patients (broken down by category).