Frances Lockhart*, Australian Hearing, Brisbane, Australia Sandra-Jill Snell, Australian Hearing, Gold Coast, Australia John Nikolarakos, Australian Hearing, Melbourne, Australia Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Business models in a Web 2.0 environment Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-05-28

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In 2012 At the Audiology Australia Conference in Adelaide South Australia, Frances Lockhart and Jill Snell reported on the use of Tele-audiology for supervision and support of clinicians and patients in rural and remote areas of Australia. This model of Tele-Audiology made use of existing internet infrastructure via Skype and remote desktop sharing. Tele-audiology was shown to be a very effective tool for ensuring equity of service and highest quality clinical care to these areas for both Paediatric and Adult hearing impaired patients, often several thousand kilometres from the nearest available specialist clinician. Since then, this process of remote clinician support and client centred clinical care has expanded significantly. Tele-audiology options within Australian Hearing has since progressed to take advantage of technological changes and additional platforms to expand this support to all Australian Hearing clinicians including those in smaller urban clinics or where senior experienced specialist clinicians to assist with complex or difficult cases are not always available.
This poster showcases the current state of Tele-audiology within Australian Hearing and includes an analysis of a telephone and email support service for clinicians that takes around 110 calls and 80 email enquires each month. This service is available to all clinicians and support staff in over 450 locations throughout Australia. This poster also describes the results of a survey sent to over 400 clinicians exploring the value of this clinical support service. The results of this analysis and survey demonstrate the value of providing a variety of Tele-Audiology platforms to ensure high quality clinical services and support for all hearing impaired patients and clinicians in a geographically diverse country.