2025 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 9-11, 2025 • Pittsburgh, PA
Award Winner/Nominee Details 2024
Karrie Hughes
I am writing to nominate a worthy candidate deserving of consideration for the 2024 Antonia Brancia Maxon Award for EHDI Excellence. Karrie Hughes is a Registered Nurse with 30 years of dedicated service and experience in the field of Newborn Hearing Screening. She joined our team at Hearts for Hearing in 2021, as Director of our Newborn Hearing Screen Services division where she has firmly established our program and led its significant growth over a short period of time.
During the pandemic our organization (Hearts for Hearing) took advantage of lower patient volumes and used that time to assess our state's health performance indicators and began considering opportunities where we might be able to impact outcomes more positively. Newborn Hearing Screening was one such area. At the time, the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2019) reported Oklahoma's Loss to Follow-Up (LTFU) at 51.1% which ranked our state 46th nationwide (tied with Texas).
In October 2021, Heart for Hearing officially began screening newborns at two small, local birthing hospitals in central Oklahoma. Since that time, we have grown our hospital contracts for newborn hearing screening services to 14 birthing centers in metro Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Hearts for Hearing is now responsible for providing newborn hearing screens for an estimated 55% of all babies born in Oklahoma, and our program continues to grow. To date, our program has screened more than 21,000 babies AND maintained a 100% capture rate with a 0% LTFU rate. Whenever needed, Karrie has also coordinated diagnostic audiological assessments with some of our largest birthing centers in their Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), allowing several families to know the hearing status of their baby upon discharge and prepare for next steps they may want to pursue for treatment.
Karrie and her team collaborate with partners, dream innovative ideas and solutions, help develop protocols, train screeners, track down families, and pursue nothing less than excellence. The program she leads for us has become a gold-standard model of care in a relatively short 24 months. Our program is a strong partner to Oklahoma's EHDI system and can serve as an example to other states or agencies interested in improving newborn hearing screen outcomes by decreasing their loss-to-follow-up percentages.
It is my honor to share Karrie's story and nominate her for the 2024 Antonia Brancia Maxon Award for EHDI Excellence. She has dedicated her life to newborn hearing screening, and she is a shining example of the commitment and legacy left by Dr. Maxon for future generations of children with hearing loss and their families.