Toward developing meaningful outcome measures for adult hearing health care, and an update on NIDCD’s September advisory council meeting

More than 30 million adults in the U.S. are estimated to have some degree of hearing loss. Audiologists and other health professionals use several tools to diagnose adult hearing loss, but these tools do not, in large part, assess individuals’ perceptions of their own hearing function or the impact that hearing impairment has on their quality of life. In this director’s message, I describe NIDCD’s efforts to support the development of standard measurement outcomes in adult hearing health care that are meaningful to both the individual with hearing loss and their clinician, and how this may inform data standards for centralized repositories.