Aaventus Medical, earAccess partner to provide high-quality hearing aids

AVENTUS Medical and earAccess have forged a partnership to meet the needs of Filipinos with hearing disabilities, providing hearing tests for patients using a state-of-the-art audiological booth in the Aventus Makati clinic, and offering high quality, affordable hearing aids. ear Access and Aventus will also offer the latest portable audiometry screening equipment that can be made available to mobile and managed corporate clinics.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) study on deafness, of the 107.6 million Filipinos in the Philippines, approximately 5 percent suffer from hearing loss. This matches the world average for moderate-to-severe hearing loss requiring hearing aids and translates to about 5.3 million Filipinos. Also from the WHO, 33 percent of people over 65 years old have disabling hearing loss with 95 percent requiring hearing aids.

earAccess conducted screenings in Mandaluyong last year with results indicating that 273 of the 28,066 screened failed the hearing test. Of the 273 patients, 230 were children under 18.

According to the Philippines Bureau of Customs, approximately only 20,000 units of hearing aids were sold in the country as of 2017. Since there are no hearing aids made in the Philippines, these are imported from other countries. The cost of hearing aids ranges between 50,000 pesos to 300,000 pesos, a price which is prohibitive to most Filipinos. With this high demand and low supply, earAccess believes it can help more Filipinos with hearing disabilities get affordable hearing aids. The partnership between earAccess and Aventus will offer hearing aids as low as 70 percent of the lowest priced unit in the country.