Telehealth-enabled auditory brainstem response testing for infants living in rural communities: the British Columbia Early Hearing Program experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: The present study investigated a telehealth-enabled auditory-brainstem-response (TH-ABR) programme provided by the British Columbia Early Hearing Program (BCEHP) to families in a remote northern area who face barriers such as travel distance and access to audiologists trained in ABR testing. Objectives were to: (i) outline the design/implementation of a TH-ABR programme, (ii) summarise equipment/procedures, and (iii) report on results for the TH-ABR programme (cost/time effectiveness, testing accuracy/efficiency, and caregiver satisfaction).Design: TH-ABR implementation was described and TH-ABR results were compared to behavioural follow-up findings to evaluate TH-ABR test accuracy. Caregivers were invited to complete TH-ABR satisfaction surveys following their appointment(s).Study sample: One hundred and two infants (mean age: 2.3 months) were assessed via TH-ABR at four points-of-care; 41/66 caregivers completed surveys.Results: The TH-ABR programme was suitable, sustainable and scalable. After 29 TH-ABR events, the service was cost neutral to BCEHP ($91,250 averted after 102 TH-ABRs). Fifty infants were identified with hearing loss and TH-ABR accuracy and efficiency were comparable to face-to-face assessments. Parent survey results indicated a high level of satisfaction with the TH-ABR experience.Conclusions: TH-ABR is efficient, accurate, valued by parents, optimises availability to audiology resources, builds local service capacity, and reduces costs for northern BC communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".