MHSRS 2024: Dr. Alyssa Davidson

Video by Sara Barger

Defense Health Agency

Aug. 26, 2024 | 3:38

The Military Health Research Symposium honors Dr. Alyssa Davidson, a research audiologist at Walter Reed Medical Center, for her outstanding research in hearing and audiology research in service members and veterans. Notably, she created a standardized test for clinicians to administer across the MHS that tests hearing using a simple tablet and headphones, which collects data across the MHS.

Dr. Davidson, who holds both AuD and PhD degrees from the University of Arizona, first came to Walter Reed as contractor in 2022 after spending two years as a post-doctoral research fellow at Northwestern University. Just one year later, in 2023, she was brought on board as a DoD Civilian in the Audiology and Speech Center at Walter Reed. In just that short period of time, her strong work ethic and her skill for leveraging new technologies to improve clinical practices have led to major advances in Audiology treatment within the DoD. Although she has made progress in many areas, the most fundamental advancement that she has made in the last year was to analyze data from more than 22,583 Service Members that was collected as part of a DHA grant (W81XWH1820014) to develop normative values for the hearing subscale of the Tinnitus and Hearing Survey (THS-H). The THS was developed in 2015 by the VA and has been in widespread use in DoD, VA, and Civilian audiology clinics. However, the THS was designed to be used to guide treatment prioritization. Normative values were not provided that would enable a clinician to look at the hearing subscale score (the THS-H) and determine if a patient with a hearing complaint score of “15” was an abnormally large, abnormally small, or an average score among SMs with similar audiometric thresholds. In her paper, Dr. Davidson provides separate percentile scores for SMs based on their audiometric thresholds (normal hearing, other H1, H2, or H3). By analyzing responses and establishing a cutoff score of 27 for clinically significant hearing problems, Dr. Davidson’s work provides clinicians with a quick and reliable way to identify patients with hearing thresholds in the normal range who may require additional audiological evaluation and management. As a direct result of the work Dr. Davison was involved in to analyze the THS-H, a decision was made to incorporate the THS-H questionnaire as part of the Military Operational Hearing Test (MOHT), which was first adopted as an acceptable auditory fitness-for-duty test in the US Army in December, 2022 and fully implemented as the only acceptable fitness-for-duty test in December, 2023. As part of the rollout of the MOHT, a tablet-based TabSINT MOHT App was developed that allowed the MOHT to be automatically administered through the auxiliary input of a calibrated audiometer (effectively replacing the CD player that is usually used for speech testing). This tablet also incorporated an electronic version of the THS-H, as well as the capability of providing the provider with the patient’s percentile score on the THS-H based on the numbers in Dr. Davidson’s 2023 paper. The MOHT app also provided a way to use optical scanning technology to scan the THS-H score, along with the rest of the MOHT score, into the DoD-wide Enterprise Clinical Audiology Application (ECAA) database. This optical scanning technology works by showing a Quick Response (QR) code on the screen of the tablet that is scanned into the ECAA using a standard barcode scanner.