 This month, Ms Ears has a question for you!
Over the past few months we've had a lot of wonderful feedback about the Ms. Ears program. This month we thought instead of having the 'Ms. Ears Question of the Month,' we would take this opportunity to address some of your concerns and to thank everyone for their praise! We also wanted to talk a little bit about the Ms. Ears program and find out what your opinion of it is.
For those of you who don't know, ‘Ms. Ears' is a program HearingCenterOnline initiated to answer your general questions about hearing and hearing loss. HearingCenterOnline and the Ms. Ears program were created because Audiotech Healthcare Corporation wanted to give back to the hard of hearing community by providing information and support to those who are hearing-impaired. Our website is devoted to providing good information to the public about products, industry news, and new technologies that may be helpful to them ... an information portal, if you will. This is a free public service, but we still invest a considerable amount of time and money to support the service from our end.
We enjoy doing this service and do our best with the resources we have, but sometimes these resources are sorely taxed to keep up with the growing demand from the visitors to our site. We hope that the revenue generated from the our sister site, HearingDepot.com, will help to improve these resources, but for now we do the best that we can.
Again, we do not charge for the Ms Ears service, we only ask that those who use it, subscribe to our "Now HEAR This!" newsletter, so that we can continue to inform everyone about what is happening at Hearing Center Online. Also, I'd like to stress that this program is intended to be for the hearing impaired community as well as their friends, families or others who want to learn more about hearing or hearing loss. Recently we have received many questions from audiology university students who are seeking help with their papers and exam questions. We welcome you to use any other resource you find on our site and would like to encourage you in your studies. However, please do not send these types of questions to Ms. Ears. Please understand, at this time, we simply do not have the resources available to be an active research tool for audiology students.
It is also important for all of our visitors to the site to realize that the Ms. Ears program is not meant as a substitute for help or service from your hearing or health care professional. Nor is this site meant for medical emergency services. (In the event of an emergency, please call 911 or your local emergency assistance number.)
When we first started this service all questions were directly forwarded to a single audiologist from Audiotech Healthcare Corporation who is very active in the company. He, (yes, at first ms. ears was a guy) volunteered his time to answer the questions. This worked wonderfully for the first few months as the volume of questions coming was not that overwhelming. However, as HearingCenterOnline continued to gain popularity, it became clear that this system was not going to work. Some of you may have noticed that the program soon became ‘swamped' with questions and we started to fall behind in our responses earlier this summer. Please accept our sincere apology for this.
A second audiologist from Audiotech Healthcare Corporation volunteered to pitch in and help with the questions. She continues to answer a good majority of the Ms. Ears questions to this day. Currently, all questions that are related to audiology are sent to a few of our audiologists who answer these questions as soon as they can. A few of the questions submitted are handled by Ms. Ears' assistant (Hearing Center Online staff), because they deal more with people looking for information about HearingCenterOnline or other contact information for various organizations. Our support staff also adds helpful links, searches for information and updates the ms. ears section of the site. We post these questions to help others with similar queries and to reduce the number of repeat questions. We respect your privacy and that is why all questions submitted are confidential and when posted to the website, personal information is removed. In addition, if requested, we will not post your question to our website.
So now that we have told you how ‘Ms. Ears' works, we'd like to tell you that we are considering revamping this program once again. Some of you may have noticed that other than our newsletter and Ms. Ears there has been little new information on our website since our launch in January. This is largely due to the time involvement of Ms. Ears. As we have said before, most of Hearing Center Online's resources are going to answering these questions and we are still having difficulty keeping up. We want to continue to improve this site and we feel we have a lot of terrific ideas like a new message board and more interviews. (See the article, What's happening at Hearing Center Online) At the same time we don't want to sacrifice the value of Ms. Ears.
One of our ideas in improving the efficiency of the Ms. Ears program was to compile more generalized questions and answers from all the existing questions and database them. Right now we get a lot of repeat questions from what is already posted on our site. Our thought is to redesign the Ms. Ears page so that you can enter your question into a form which will then search the database for a generic answer (mini-article). If this did not answer your question or your question was not in the database, you would have the option of sending it directly to Ms. Ears.
What do you think? In order to make this site a success we need your opinion. Do you think that this would work? Do you have any other suggestions or ideas?
Please email us at msears@hearingcenteronline.com and let us know. Hope to hear from you soon!
Sincerely,
Ms. Ears and the Hearing Center Online Staff!
Last Updated: October, 2000
| 