Thomas M. Helfer
Hearing Conservation Program
US Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine
Over the last 5 years the public health community has given significant attention to using outcomes analysis and epidemiologic inference as the evidence base for clinical practice guideline development and for healthcare quality improvement benchmarking. For almost a decade the USACHPPM has partnered with academic and research institutions and worked on epidemiologic analyses to develop an evidence-based practice of hearing loss prevention performance evaluation.
A statistical analysis software product of one of these collaborative efforts is being delivered to USACHPPM. The anticipated primary users drove the design of this product. The users are a multi-disciplinary clinical investigation team. The team includes subject matter expertise in clinical practice, clinical research, bio-statistics, and epidemiology.
This team is currently working to implement the product at USACHPPM to develop command health information for customers. This paper describes this team's epidemiologic inference methods and related clinical data management activities to accomplish an evidence-based practice of hearing loss prevention and quality of care improvement in collaboration with primary customers.
The clinical data management and statistical analysis protocols used are in line with the Military Health System's strategic information management infrastructure mandates. This will be a significant aid in the transfer of these methods to the other services' preventive medicine and environmental health centers as well as transfer to the non-DOD health services sector for hearing conservation program evaluation.
Thomas Helfer, Ph.D.
DSN 584-3797
410-436-3797
Abstract: A task force of 900 Texas National Guard soldiers were given soldier readiness processing (SRP) at a remote field site on North Fort Hood. It was imperative that the medical SRP locate on-site to reduce soldiers' time away from training, and to reduce traffic on the heavily traveled west range road. Because Fort Hood has no mobile test capability, the decision was made to contract services. This presentation considers the challenges involved when contracting hearing test services for large deployments. Elements of a successful product will be outlined and discussed; to include: equipment performance, employee performance, compliance with Army Hearing Conservation record keeping guidelines, and the ability to convert hearing test data into the Department of Defense format. This study suggests that contractors can perform very well in the field environment and deliver a quality product despite differences in equipment and software.