Where Audiology Lands in the Metrics of Healthcare

I have been struggling as the best place to start this series. I decided it is always best to start with data and a "review of the literature".

Throughout this series, I am going to categorize and refer to audiology as a healthcare discipline.? I am making this determination because we are Medicare and Medicaid approved providers, we are commonly recognized, credentialed and contracted by health insurers, and we prescribe, order and dispense FDA approved medical devices, such as hearing aids and auditory prosthetic devices. As a result, we should compare and contrast our profession against other health care disciplines.

There are some foundational articles that help lay the groundwork for this introductory piece and the articles that will follow:

·????? Windmill and Freeman: Demand for Audiology Services: 30-yr Projections and Impact on Academic Program (this now 11-year-old article is an important foundational read on this topic).

·????? Bray and Amlani: A New Analysis of the Audiology Workforce, Benchmarked to Other Healthcare Professions

·????? Amlani: 20Q – Audiology Economics

I also did some digging of my own through the data available at https://datausa.io/ and https://www.bls.gov/. I encourage you to review these sites and the information they have available about audiology and other healthcare professions. I specifically researched audiology, chiropractic medicine, dentistry, medicine, occupational therapy, optometry, physical therapy, physician assisting, and psychology.?

Here is what I found:

·????? We are the only profession that Medicare classifies as supplier (the Medicare Audiology Access Improvement Act hopes to rectify this) ; physicians are classified, by Medicare, as physicians; chiropractors, dentists, and optometrists are classified as limited license physicians; psychologists are classified as practitioners and occupational and physical therapists are classified as therapists.

·????? There approximately 19,000 audiologists in the United States. This makes audiology the smallest (by far) of the doctoring professions.

·????? The average wage for an audiologist was $87,345.? This was higher than optometrists, physical therapists, and optometrists but lower than the other disciplines.

·????? 91% of audiologists are female (this is the highest percentage of women compared to other doctoring professions).

·????? Male audiologists, on average, are paid more than female audiologists, which, sadly, is inconsistent across all of the healthcare disciplines I examined; male audiologists averaged $117, 628 and females averaged $81, 904 (which is lower than the overall average).

·????? The length of education and yearly costs of education are similar to that of other doctoring professions, although it takes one year less, on average, to become an occupational therapist or a physician assistant (and this profession makes significantly more money on average).

·????? Audiology graduates markedly fewer audiologists than other disciplines graduate their own professionals.? For example in 2022, audiology was estimated to have 939 graduates, compared to optometry, (which was the next highest number of graduates) which had 1746 graduates.

·????? While audiology is expected to grow, it is not growing to meet these expectations.

·????? No other profession (even professions markedly bigger than audiology) is represented, at the national level, by more than one, major professional association.? The American Academy of Audiology does not publish its membership numbers but the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association does and they represent 14,059 audiologists (about 74% of all audiologists). ?

In this series, I will begin to break down what these data means to audiology now and in the future. The next stop in this series will be the cost and return on investment of AuD education.