The Akron Children's Hospital audiology team diagnose and treat hearing loss in children. Our goals are to identify hearing loss as early in life as possible, provide access to hearing aids, and coordinate follow-up services for intervention, monitoring and ongoing evaluation.
The Audiology Department requires a referral from your primary care physician or specialist prior to scheduling an appointment.
Our pediatric audiologists are experienced in an array of diagnostics for infants, children, teens, and individuals with neurological and/or developmental complications who are considered difficult to test.
Depending on the age and developmental level of your child, we offer several options:
The pediatric audiologists are fully integrated into the hospital providing inpatient and outpatient evaluations and special services for the Down syndrome program, cystic fibrosis center, autism diagnostic clinic, infant therapy program and cancer survivorship program.
We provide a complete range of hearing aid types (e.g., digital and bone anchored, etc.). If your child is under 18 years of age or has an underlying medical condition, clearance from an ENT physician is required before the hearing aid evaluation and fitting.
These fittings and evaluations include:
Hearing aid and earmold selection
Counseling regarding care and maintenance
Electroacoustic analysis
Real ear measurements and DSL programming for enhanced hearing aid fitting, verification, and validation
Assistive listening devices, including FM units, telephone amplifiers, alerting devices and Bluetooth accessories
Custom earmolds, swim molds, noise reduction earmolds, and musician’s earmolds
Follow-up appointments to ensure optimal fit
Collaboration with local schools and county ESC’s to ensure academic needs are being met with regards to hearing needs
EARS (Early Auditory Response Strategies) program which is a collaborative effort between the Audiology department and the Speech Pathology department. For children diagnosed with hearing loss, we work their families and physicians to get them on track with the services they need such as amplification (hearing aids) and listening habilitation, speech and language evaluation and therapy, Early Intervention services, infant therapy evaluations, and assistance with coordinating school services, genetics evaluations, and special imaging
At Akron Children’s, your child’s health and safety is our priority. Please continue to bring your child for wellness visits, vaccinations or sick care appointments that keep children healthy. We want to assure you that we have taken additional precautions to ensure a safe environment for your child and family. The following are additional safety efforts, in addition to our normal cleaning protocols, that we are taking to help you be comfortable bringing your child to an appointment.
The number of caregivers permitted to accompany a child to an appointment is dependent on the department you are visiting. Everyone visiting an Akron Children's facility is asked to wear masks or face coverings, except for kids under 2 or those with sensory issues. Masks will be provided for visitors who do not bring their own.
Akron Children's now offers Mobile Check-in to limit your exposure to others. You'll receive a text an hour before your child's appointment arrival time. Click the link in the text when you reach the Akron Children's facility for your child's appointment. You will receive a confirmation text that reminds you to wait in your car. Once we determine appropriate spacing is available inside the building, you'll receive a third text to let you know it's OK to come in for your appointment.
Immediately upon entering the building, your temperature will be taken, either by a thermal scanner or a greeter who will also ask you a few questions.
If you are in a waiting room, you’ll notice signs and a limited number of chairs. This is to remind our patients to keep 6 feet of physical distance between your family and others.
Call your child’s healthcare professional if your child is sick with fever, cough, or difficulty breathing and has been in close contact with a person known to have COVID-19, or if you live in or have recently traveled from an area with ongoing spread of COVID-19. Your health care professional will work with Ohio’s public health department and the CDC to determine if your child needs to be tested for COVID-19.
View all the safety precautions Akron Children's is taking.
We perform a range of pediatric audiology tests including the following:
hearing loss, auditory processing disorders, hearing aids