On May 11th, 2007 John Tracy Clinic launched a model program called Baby Sound Check® designed to fill critical gaps in the early detection and treatment of hearing loss in collaboration with Los Angeles area community healthcare clinics. The program is funded by a gift from Monica and Philip Rosenthal.

The first year of the three-year pilot project was implemented in partnership with five community clinics owned by AltaMed Health Services Corporation, a leading Federally Qualified Health Center in East Los Angeles. Baby Sound Check® will assess and monitor the hearing health of over 10,000 children in the first three years and thousands more thereafter as the program becomes a self-sustaining model that will be extended throughout the Los Angeles area, and disseminated and replicated nationally. In addition to AltaMed, St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, South Central Family Health Center and Venice Family Clinic are on board for the project beginning in Year 2.

Young children suspected of hearing loss are referred to JTC for comprehensive diagnostic evaluation.  If significant hearing loss is confirmed, the families will be given guidance and information by JTC counselors and audiologists.  Every identified child will be invited to join JTC’s free Parent/Infant Program and assigned a case manager for continued educational, psychological and audiological support.

Parents who have not had a newborn hearing screening, can make an appointment at John Tracy Clinic for infant hearing screening at 213-748-5481.

Progress Report, March 2009

Even before birth, a baby can hear its mother’s voice and distinguish it from other voices. During the critical first year of life, the child’s neural network lays its principal foundation for speech and language development. Unless that baby is deaf. Unrecoverable time is lost when identification of hearing loss occurs after infancy. When children are deprived of critical language learning opportunities by undetected hearing loss, they frequently experience disruptions in communicative, social, emotional, cognitive, and academic growth. Early detection and immediate intervention can actually change the way their brains develop.

Baby Sound Check was created by John Tracy Clinic in partnership with local Los Angeles area community clinics to close the gap between babies who receive hospital-based newborn hearing screening and follow-up and the 30 to 40 percent who slip though the cracks. Launched in May 2007, it is an innovative model program for integrating hearing screening into routine well baby care. The program is also aimed at finding children who have progressive losses or contract an illness or condition that causes hearing loss after birth.

Developed through a major grant from the Rosenthal Family Foundation, the project will reach thousands of infants and toddlers in underserved communities over its three-year period of implementation by introducing physicians and medical assistants to best practices for hearing screening, monitoring and following-up. Every identified child is given the opportunity to join JTC’s free Parent/Infant Program and receive expert educational, psychological and audiological support, including the loan of hearing aids.

Today, following its first full year of implementation, Baby Sound Check has found a place on medical charts alongside other well-baby tests and measurements at seven community healthcare clinics associated with AltaMed Health Services Corporation and Venice Family Clinic. Three more clinics that are a part of St. John’s Well Child and Family Center and South Central Family Health Center are due to begin screening later this year. To date, over 200 medical staff (nurses, assistants, and physicians) have been trained to conduct specialized hearing tests to detect possible hearing loss in infants and toddlers, and over 1,300 children have benefited from the program.

A recent contributing grant from Kaiser Community Benefit Charitable Contributions Program has allowed JTC to make room for a number of components that we now know at the close of our first pilot year are essential to imbedding such a model into busy community clinic schedules and protocols. For example, we have realized that we must have more intensive physician and pediatric team training and that the materials we develop for training and dissemination will need to be more practicable, accessible and built on multimedia, web-based technology. We have also found enthusiastic and widespread interest in Baby Sound Check from other community healthcare organizations, locally and across the USA; the Kaiser Program will enable us to plan for expansion beyond our original goals.

As of March 2009, protocols have been analyzed and revised to enhance the education of doctors, nurses and medical assistants in screening equipment use and procedures. The training is now three-fold. The doctors come to JTC so they can best concentrate their time on this one issue, while touring JTC to see first hand the impact of their efforts. The medical assistants and nurses are trained initially at their individual clinics and then do their practicum on entire classrooms of children at area preschools as part of JTC’s Community Hearing Screening program, which gives them the opportunity to develop proficiency more rapidly.