Primary Care Providers
You are the medical home for Iowa children and families
Each year, approximately 12,000 babies are born in the United States with permanent hearing loss. With 3 of every 1,000 newborns having hearing loss, it is the most frequently occurring birth defect. Additionally, another 2 to 3 per 1,000 children will acquire hearing loss after birth.
As the primary provider, it is your role to connect families to the appropriate audiological, intervention and consultative services to develop a plan specifically designed for the infant identified with hearing loss or identified with factors associated with early hearing loss. The Joint Committee on Infant Hearing Position Statement charges you to “assume responsibility to ensure that the audiological assessment is conducted on infants who do not pass screening and must initiate referrals for medical specialty evaluations necessary to determine the etiology of the hearing loss.” Your cooperation is imperative for ensuring that the child achieves the best possible outcomes.
Please use the resources to the left to further explore best practices, research articles, potential communication options, laws governing your practice and information available for your patients, along with other reference pieces.
Key resources:
Thank you for your work. You are a valued member of the Iowa EHDI Team. Together we will work to support children who are deaf or hard of hearing and their families.
Learn about EHDI best practices and access tools to help you meet these standards. Also includes current EHDI research articles.
These are materials that you can use to learn more about the importance of early hearing detection and intervention and share with your patients. There is also a newsletter to keep you informed about the happenings at the EHDI program, a parent fact sheet, a family resource guide and much more.
The EHDI database is the primary system through which EHDI program data is collected. If you have a need to access the database, or want to learn more about how to use the database, the information can be found here.
There are a variety of reporting and referral forms that are available for your use, including to Early ACCESS. Another set of forms that is available are the parent refusal documents.
EHDI operates under Iowa Code and Iowa Administrative Rules. Those documents can be accessed here.
Additional resources to explore with families:
The EHDI program receives a monthly import from the Iowa Board of Medicine and Iowa Board of Nursing with Iowa's providers' public phone numbers and addresses which birthing facilities use to report the infant's primary care provider (PCP), as required by law. This information has been used for years to follow-up with an infant’s PCP if the infant is in need of a hearing screen or diagnostic assessment or to notify an infant’s PCP if the child has a risk factor associated with hearing loss.
If your contact information is incorrect, you must update your information with your respective Board:
- To contact the Iowa Board of Medicine, call (515) 281-6641 and request to update your public address or add your work address or online at https://medicalboard.iowa.gov/services/change_of_address.html.
- To contact the Iowa Board of Nursing, visit https://nursing.iowa.gov/. Click on “IBON Online Services”, then click the orange button “IBON Online Services” and then click on “Update Contact Information”. Sign in as if you are renewing your license. Be sure to check “Yes” to the question, "Would you like your work address to be added to your record?". Complete the page and click "Continue". You will then be taken to the address change page.
Once the change is made, your information will update in our system in the following monthly import. Please call the Iowa EHDI program with questions at (800) 383-3826.
