- In this video, I'm gonna show you if hearing aids
from Costco are any good, comin' up.
(upbeat music)
Hi guys, Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Anthem, Arizona
and on this channel I cover a bunch
of hearing-related information to help
make you a better informed consumer.
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Everyone always asks me if Costco hearing aids are any good
and my response to them is always the same.
It really depends on if the hearing care provider
who works at that Costco programs
those hearing aids correctly
and if they follow best practices.
You see, it doesn't matter how good your hearing aids
are if those hearing aids haven't been programmed correctly
to your hearing loss prescription.
And one of the main ways that you program
a hearing aid correctly is to use Real Ear Measurement.
Now, the fortunate thing is is that Costco actually mandates
that their hearing care providers use Real Ear Measurement.
But making sure that they use it,
and making sure that they use it well,
are two completely different things.
Now, every week I get patients who come into
my clinic who got their hearing aids at Costco
and so I'm gonna show you a good,
a bad and an ugly fitting by a Costco hearing care provider.
When I'm evaluating to see how well hearing devices
are programmed I do two main things.
The first one is is I have a patient fill out
a subjective questionnaire to see
how much perceived benefit they're
getting from their hearing aids.
If someone has hearing aids already,
I have them complete the International Outcome Inventory
for Hearing Aids which is also know as the IOI-HA.
When evaluating hearing aid performance with the IOI-HA,
I like to give each column a point value.
Since the scores on the right hand side
indicate significant benefit with hearing aids,
I give boxes in that column a value of five.
The scores on the left hand side indicate
almost no benefit with hearing aids
and I give boxes on that side a score of one.
The higher the total overall score,
the more benefit a patient is
receiving from their hearing aids.
The lowest score is a seven,
and the highest score possible is a 35.
Second, I perform Real Ear Measurement
to objectively measure whether or not
these patients' hearing aids have been programmed correctly
to their hearing loss prescription.
What this will show me is whether or not
they're getting the right amount of amplification
at each frequency for their particular type of hearing loss.
Now, if you'd like to learn
more about these outcome measures,
I will have videos linked in the description.
So using these two forms of evaluation,
let's go ahead and check out the first patient.
For simplicity, we will only be focusing
on one hearing aid per patient.
For this patient, their audiogram indicates a normal,
sloping to moderately severe high
frequency sensorineural hearing loss.
As we calculate the score for
their perceived hearing ability using
the IOI-HA with their Costco hearing aids programmed
by a Costco hearing care provider,
we can see that they scored their performance favorably.
Overall, they ranked their performance as a 30 out of 35.
When we look at how the hearing aids
were programmed using Real Ear Measurement,
we are looking to see if
their hearing aid amplification matches
the prescription for their hearing loss.
The pink hash mark line indicates
the prescription of amplification
for this patient's normal sloping
to moderately severe hearing loss
and the solid pink line indicates
where the haring aids are programmed
in relation to their prescription.
Ideally, we would want these lines
to overlap as closely as possible.
As you can see, there are a few spots
that are under-amplified and over-amplified,
but in general the Costco provider did
a decent job of programming this hearing aid
which is why this particular patient reported good
overall benefit from their devices.
Overall, this is what I would consider
to be a good Costco hearing aid fitting.
Now if a patient's Costco hearing aids aren't locked
to where they can only go to another Costco for programming,
I will typically go in to the software and reprogram them
to match their prescriptive targets as closely as possible,
and adjust any special features
of the hearing aids to maximize overall benefit.
In this screenshot, the purple line indicates
the output of the hearing aid after
a reprogramming of this patient's Costco hearing aid.
This is about as close as you'll ever see
a hearing aid output curve get
to a prescriptive hearing loss target.
Here is an overlap comparison of the Costco programming
to the new programming that I made for this patient.
After turning this patient loose for several weeks,
I had them come back to complete
another IOI-HA questionnaire to see
if they saw any improvement,
and they improved their score
by four points from a 30 to 34 out of 35.
Alright, now let's check out the second patient.
This patient has a mild sloping
to moderately severe high frequency
sensorineural hearing loss.
As we calculate their score from the IOA-HA questionnaire,
we see that they scored only a 19 out of 35,
which would indicate poor perceived benefit
with their Costco hearing aids.
When we check out how well their hearing aids
are programmed, we can clearly see
that they were not programmed very close
to their hearing loss prescription.
As you can see, this patient was significantly
under-amplified in the high frequencies,
which are critical for improved speech clarity.
A score of 19 on the IOI-HA is not surprising,
considering the programming of this hearing aid.
Overall, I would classify this
as a bad Costco hearing aid fitting.
Fortunately, this patient's Costco hearings aids
were not locked and I was able to adjust the programming.
I wasn't able to match the prescriptive target
beyond 3,000 hertz with this Costco device,
but as you can see, compared to the Costco programming,
we are much closer to the rest
of this patient's hearing loss prescription.
After adjusting the amplification
and the special features of their hearing aids,
this patient came back after several weeks
to redo the IOI-HA questionnaire,
which indicated a 13 point perceived improvement,
from a score of 19 to 32, out of a total 35 points,
with their properly programmed Costco hearing aids.
And last but not least,
let's go ahead and check out
the third patient's Costco fitting.
This patient has a flat, moderate conductive hearing loss.
A conductive hearing loss can be identified
by seeing a gap between the brackets
which indicate the hearing sensitivity of the hearing organ,
the cochlea itself and the Xs,
which indicate the hearing sensitivity
once sound has to pass from the outer ear
through the middle ear, all the way into the inner ear.
Conductive hearing losses can be tricky to fit
with hearing aids if you don't know that you're doing.
According to the IOI-HA for this patient,
they scored their perceived performance
with their Costco hearing aids as a 9 out of 35.
Let me repeat that in case you missed it,
they scored only a 9 out of 35.
It doesn't take us long to realize why they scored
their performance so poorly when
we look at their Real Ear Measurement of their programming.
This has to be one of the worst hearing aid fittings
that I have ever measured in my office
and this tells me one of two things,
either the Costco hearing care provider
did not perform Real Ear Measurement at all,
or they actually had no clue how to use the equipment
to program these hearing devices correctly.
Either way, as a result this patient went
over a year wondering why they were not perceiving
any benefit with their hearing aids.
This is what I call a ugly Costco hearing aid fitting.
To add insult to injury,
this patient had purchased locked Costco hearing aids
that don't allow me to make adjustments on them,
even though the devices were probably capable
of being programmed correctly.
Fortunately, this patient somehow trusted me
to fit them with a new set of devices
that I was able to program to
their hearing loss prescription, which you can see here.
Here is a comparison between
their Costco hearing aid programming
with their Costco hearing aid,
and their new hearing aid programming
with a new hearing aid.
Other than the little dip at 4,000 hertz,
I was able to match the prescription
out to about 7,000 hertz.
After several weeks of this patient using
their new, properly programmed hearing aids,
they came back to complete the IOI-HA
and scored their performance with their hearing aids
a perfect 35 out of 35.
Alright guys, so there's the answer to your question
on if Costco hearing aids are any good?
As you can see, each one of these patients
had hearing aids from Costco that were actually capable
of treating their hearing loss and treating it well.
It just came down to if those hearing devices
were programmed correctly for those individual patients.
Now, I'm not saying that Costco hearing care providers
are inherently not good at programming hearing devices,
I'm saying that in the hearing care industry,
in general, it just really depends
on if the hearing care provider
that you work with is capable of treating
your hearing loss correctly with
whatever devices they recommend for you.
So, if you end up finding yourself
with a hearing care provider that is not getting
you benefit with your hearing aids,
you need to make sure you find one that does.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions,
leave them in the comment section below.
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I'll see ya next time.
(upbeat music)