For decades, cochlear implant success has been measured by speech scores. But what if those numbers don’t tell the whole story?
Meet Teddy McRackan, MD, neurotologist at the Medical University of South Carolina and one of the leading researchers redefining how cochlear implant outcomes are measured. As the developer of the CIQOL (Cochlear Implant Quality of Life) framework, digital platform, and the first national cochlear implant data repository, Dr. McRackan is helping shift the conversation from how patients perform in the sound booth to how they actually live with their cochlear implant.
What You’ll Hear:
Beyond the Speech Score: Why traditional speech recognition testing often has surprisingly little correlation with how patients communicate, socialize, and experience life outside the clinic.
The Quality of Life Revolution: How patient-reported outcomes are changing the way clinicians evaluate cochlear implant success and why quality of life may be the outcome that matters most.
A Better Way to Counsel Patients: Why nearly one-third of patients who are recommended for cochlear implantation never move forward, and how functional outcome modeling can help patients make more informed decisions.
Predicting Real-World Success: How new prediction models use quality-of-life data to estimate which patients are most likely to experience meaningful improvement after cochlear implantation.
The CIQOL Digital Platform: A look at the new clinician dashboard that collects patient-reported outcomes before surgery, tracks progress over time, and brings meaningful data directly into the clinical workflow.
Building the First National CI Data Repository: Why the field needs thousands of patients, not hundreds, to truly understand cochlear implant outcomes and how a national prospective database could transform research, prediction models, and patient care.
Dr. McRackan challenges one of the longest-standing assumptions in cochlear implant care: that a speech recognition score alone can define success. Instead, he argues that understanding how patients function in everyday life, their communication, listening effort, social participation, emotional well-being, and overall quality of life, should be central to both counseling and long-term care.
Who should listen?
Audiologists, otologists, neurotologists, cochlear implant teams, hearing healthcare professionals, researchers, program directors, students, residents, fellows, healthcare administrators, and anyone interested in the future of outcome measurement and patient-centered cochlear implant care.
If you’ve ever had a patient with modest speech scores who tells you their cochlear implant changed their life, or a patient with excellent scores who still struggles, this episode explains why both experiences can be true and how the next generation of cochlear implant care will measure what really matters.
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This episode is sponsored by Envoy Medical.