2025 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 9-11, 2025 • Pittsburgh, PA
Award Winner/Nominee Details 2023
Karrie Hughes Moser
With much enthusiasm, I nominate Karrie Hughes Moser for the Antonia Brancia Maxon Award for EHDI Excellence. For the past 22 years, Moser, a registered nurse certified in neonatal intensive care, has dedicated her career to newborn hearing screening (NBHS). She began her NBHS career in 2000 by helping launch NBHS programs at 14 hospitals in Oklahoma. After two years of building successful Oklahoma NBHS programs, she became the Pediatrix NBHS Operations Regional Manager and oversaw NBHS programs across nine states. Within another year, she was promoted to the Pediatrix Corporate NBHS Team and was responsible for operations and quality control of Pediatrix's NBHS programs in 36 states. The NBHS programs she oversaw had a loss-to-follow-up rate of less than 10% during her tenure. From 2010 to 2013, she managed the Pediatrix NBHS programs for the West and East Region states.
While overseeing NBHS programs for Pediatrix, Moser was directly involved in all aspects pertaining to NBHS. She personally screened the hearing of thousands of infants. Routinely, her programs screened over 99% of the infants born in the hospitals she served. She collaborated with industry partners to develop NBHS ABR systems that are simple and efficient to use while also maximizing the sensitivity/specificity of screening results. She developed training programs for NBHS screeners and created scripts for screeners to follow to ensure families were provided with appropriate information following their infant's hearing screening. She was also instrumental in developing software programs and data management systems that were used to seamlessly deliver NBHS data to the state EHDI programs and provide real-time metrics for quality assurance and control.
Moser's efforts do not end with NBHS alone. Her most impressive achievement is quite possibly the exceptionally low loss-to-follow-up rates achieved at the NBHS programs she has overseen. She has worked tirelessly and creatively to create systems to ensure infants undergo diagnostic assessment after not passing their hearing screening, and when they are identified with hearing loss, she ensures they receive the audiology and EHDI services they need.
In an attempt to address a loss-to-follow-up rate in excess of 50% in Oklahoma, Hearts for Hearing (HFH) became a provider of NBHS services in 2021 and named Moser as the Director of the HFH NBHS program. To date, HFH has screened the hearing of almost 9,000 infants, and not a single infant has been lost-to-follow-up. The average age of diagnosis is 32 days, the final inpatient/outpatient refer rate is less than 1%, and 21 infants have been diagnosed with hearing loss (incidence: 2.36 out of 1,000).
Karrie Hughes Moser deserves recognition for her long and successful EHDI career. She has achieved excellence in all aspects of NBHS from direct service provision to the creation of innovative systems and solutions to optimize NBHS/EHDI programs and outcomes. She embodies all the qualities and characteristics associated with this prestigious award.