Philip Zazove, M.D., professor and the George A. Dean Chair of the Department of Family Medicine, has been recognized with an Honorable Mention as part of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) 2022 Research Paper of the Year Award.
He received the honor for a publication titled, “Effective Hearing Loss Screening in Primary Care: The Early Auditory Referral-Primary Care Study,” published in the November/December 2020 edition of Annals of Family Medicine. Zazove, who is a practicing physician with hearing loss, served as the paper’s first author and collaborated in this study with a team of researchers, including faculty from U-M Family Medicine.
This recognition is awarded by the STFM Research Committee for high quality and high impact family medicine research over the last year. Dr. Zazove’s paper was selected as an honorable mention for the highly competitive award among a pool of approximately 200 papers written by STFM members.
His paper analyzed the impact of an electronic alert used to identify patients with hearing loss so that they can be connected to specialized care for early detection and potential treatment.
Known as the Early Auditory Referral-Primary Care (EAR-PC) study, Zazove and his team tested an automated, electronic alert during routine visits for patients 55 and older at 10 community-based clinics in two health systems. The prompt encouraged physicians to ask their patients: “Do you have difficulty with your hearing?” If patients answered yes, they were referred to audiology services that could detect early hearing loss and initiate treatment as indicated.
The research team used patient records to determine if patients who answered yes to the screening question ultimately received a referral to an audiologist, whether they actually saw the audiologist, and whether they agreed to try hearing aids.
“In this innovative implementation study, Dr. Zazove and his research team have refined and tested a primary care-based strategy to detect early hearing loss, a commonly under-diagnosed and under-treated disability” said Caroline Richardson, M.D., editor of Annals of Family Medicine. “This paper shows that thoughtfully-designed, automated, electronic medical records alerts can help identify and facilitate access to effective treatments for hearing loss in its early stages.
“Additionally, this study demonstrates the power of implementation science research to improve equity, access and quality in primary care,” she added.
The team used the data from this intervention to publish an additional paper in a subsequent edition of Annals of Family Medicine in September 2021, titled, “Implementation of a Hearing Loss Screening Intervention in Primary Care”. Zazove served as senior author on this paper.
Zazove and his team’s work will be recognized at the STFM Annual Spring Conference in Indianapolis. The abstract from the November 2020 Annals publication will be displayed during the poster sessions beginning Sunday, May 1, through Tuesday afternoon, May 3.
Zazove and members of the Department of Family Medicine, along with colleagues from other universities, received the 2018 STFM Research Paper of the Year for the paper, "U.S. Medical Schools' Compliance With the Americans With Disabilities Act: Findings From a National Study," published in the journal, Academic Medicine.
