Hearing Aid Fitting & Orientation
Appalachian Audiology provides quality, fair-priced, durable, prescription level hearing aids for children and adults with a 3 year loss, damage, and repair warranty.
Consumer protection laws permit a “real world” thirty day trial with hearing aids to evaluate their clarity, comfort, and overall effectiveness.
A specific hearing aid will be recommended for you. The model is dictated by the configuration and severity of the hearing loss. The Clinic dispenses several manufacturers of hearing aids. The make is often due to dynamic changes in the hearing aid industry, and often due to your lifestyle that necessitates a feature that only one manufacturer has available. Some circuits work better on a "flat" hearing loss, some on a "high frequency loss", some only for a severe to profound hearing loss, etc. The audiologist will give you the reasons for the recommendation.
The devices are ordered, and a hearing aids fitting and orientation is scheduled. At the fitting, the devices are custom programmed for you, based on your hearing thresholds, ability to hear in noise, loudness tolerance levels and the resonance of the ear canals. Most can be further adjusted by you with an app on your phone or a separate remote control. Some prefer a completely automatic hearing aid that self adjusts. Others like to “tinker” with the settings. You will be provided orientation to use, care, and clean the hearing aids, and also demo the new connections to your phone and TV.
A thirty-day trial begins with periodic visits to adjust sound settings for a beginning user to settings for an experienced user, once acclimatization occurs. In other words, hearing doesn’t change, but listening skills can improve quickly. A conformity visit is scheduled after about two weeks to measure brain changes, improvements in perception, reduction of tinnitus, comfort, etc.
Follow up visits are scheduled, usually every six months. Hearing loss usually worsens with time, so the selected devices offer a broad range of hearing improvement to allow for reprogramming to increase the hearing levels as needed.
Ongoing Maintenance
At Appalachian Audiology, we recommend having an audiologist check the function of your devices every 6 months. Hearing aids can be re-tuned for changes in hearing or to address sound quality concerns. We pride ourselves on our low “lost to follow-up” rates. For our self-pay patients, ongoing maintenance is included in your service package with the hearing aids. For insurance patients and those who originally purchased their devices elsewhere, we offer fee for service hearing aid checks.
Bundled-pricing for self-pay patients
Appalachian Audiology offers a bundled-pricing approach to the purchase of hearing instruments to limit ongoing costs for maintenance. This means that our prices for hearing instruments includes:
The hearing instruments
Programming adjustments by an audiogist for the life of the instruments
Custom earmolds (if needed)
10 packs of hearing aid batteries or 2 rechargeable built-in batteries (for compatible devices).
Dry Spot Dehumidifier for nightly storage and moisture reduction and a cleaning kit
A generous repair warranty
A loss/damage warranty
Services for Hearing Aids Purchased Elsewhere:
Appalachian Audiology services hearing aids from all premium hearing aid manufacturers including Phonak, Signia, Resound, Oticon, Widex, Starkey and Unitron. Please contact our office to speak with an audiologist to see if we are able to work with your devices.
Hearing Aids Purchased Online
It is our experience that many hearing aids purchased on the secondary internet market are resales and do not include a genuine manufacturer warranty. Hearing aid manufacturers discourage the sale of prescription level hearing aids via the internet. If you purchased hearing aids over the internet, we can perform an electro-acoustic analysis of the hearing aid to ensure that the electronics match the product name and promise.
Hearing Aids Purchased at a "Big Box" Store
We are happy to offer a second opinion for hearing aid fittings performed at larger, big box stores by performing real ear probe microphone measurements and speech-in-noise testing to detail how the hearing aid is actually performing. Service fees apply for hearing aids purchased elsewhere.
