Can Your Patients Hear You?
By Kristen Pratt Machado
Originally at decisionsindentistry.com
Summary & scoring by The Bell Brief (Dr. Jennifer Bell) using the Drill-Down Protocol (Drill-Down Score) — not the original publisher.
Why it matters for dental
Hearing-loss accommodations are now a basic patient-experience expectation; practices that ignore them risk lower satisfaction scores and potential liability under ADA communication-access rules.
Key points
- Over 50 million U.S. adults have measurable hearing loss, a demographic that overlaps heavily with typical dental recall populations.
- Simple, zero-cost tactics—facing the patient, reducing background noise, using written instructions—can lower anxiety and reduce missed or misunderstood post-op directives.
- Decisions in Dentistry article frames this as both clinical courtesy and risk management, not a marketing gimmick.
- No regulatory mandate or product is mentioned, so impact is operational rather than compliance-driven.
Who should care
Read the original on Decisions in Dentistry
Full reporting and any paywall content live on decisionsindentistry.com. We summarize and score; we do not republish.
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