We greatly appreciate your commitment to provide care and advance research for children and adolescents with hearing loss. In every facet of our work, from patient care to research to family support, philanthropy has been a driving force behind our ability to achieve remarkable milestones in pediatric care. Your dedicated support enables Lurie Children’s Audiology Department and Cochlear Implant Program to continue to provide high quality care to the patients and families we serve. We are pleased to share with you the following achievements and highlights from the past year.

Lurie Children’s is home to one of the world’s largest and most experienced cochlear implant programs, which was founded by pediatric otolaryngologist Nancy M. Young, MD, FACS, FAAP, to transform the lives of children with profound hearing loss. More than 30 years later, her leadership and expertise continue to impact patients at Lurie Children’s and those across the world.

Loaner Hearing Aid Program

Lurie Children’s continues to provide essential loaner hearing aids to patients. We continuously cull our device stock and remove older ones from our inventory so that we can offer top-quality hearing aids. Hearing aids that are loaned out are important for patients to bridge the gap between evaluation and actual cochlear implantation and while children have their hearing aids repaired or replaced. Over the course of FY23, we lent out 785 loaner hearing aids benefitting 471 patients. This continues to be a critical resource for our patients and provides peace of mind for parents who know they can turn to the program without having to worry that their child’s hearing might be impacted.

School Advocacy for Children: Hart Family Cochlear Implant Education Coordinator

Our Education Coordinators specialize in serving children with different medical conditions that present specific learning challenges. They also work with patients, parents, and schools to help assure that Individualized Education Programs integrate the needs of patients whose learning may be affected by their chronic illness.

Jen Haney, MA, DT-H, the Hart Family Cochlear Implant Education Coordinator, continues to be a critical patient advocate within the many schools and varying districts where the children we serve attend. She is a unique, highly important resource who helps optimize learning environments for children and schools throughout the six-county Chicago region. She educates and collaborates with school professionals to improve the academic, social, and emotional growth of children with cochlear implants.

The Education Coordinator sets Lurie Children’s apart from many peer institutions that do not have this critical program. Jen is an essential resource for parents, educational professionals, and therapists to ensure that children have appropriate accommodations at school and assists in amending students’ Individualized Education Program (IEPs) to optimize their learning.

Jen is often called upon by parents to help their child receive appropriate classroom accommodations. In FY23, Jen assisted 223 students, conducted 57 meetings with school staff and community organizations, attended 4 conferences, and gave 17 presentations.  In the last year, she served 17 school districts and cooperatives in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. Additionally, after a three-year hiatus, Jen hosted Lurie Day at the hospital and attendance was at maximum capacity with 95 attendees and a waitlist, demonstrating the importance of this event for the wider audiology community. 

Jen continues to represent Lurie Children's at a local and national level by submitting a poster for ACIA 2024 (pending acceptance). She was also invited to be an abstract reviewer and choose content for the ACIA conference in Vancouver and was awarded a grant by Lurie Children's Family Services Department providing funds to attend the ACIA conference in July 2024. To highlight one of her presentations in the last year, Jen had the opportunity to present at the Early Intervention Illinois Teachers of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing pre-conference last March. Her presentation was titled Teaching Parents about Their Child's Hearing Loss: Beyond the Xs and Os. Due to Jen's expanding reach, Jen was promoted to Senior Education Liaison in FY23, further demonstrating her commitment to the patients she serves.

Music Therapy

In an environment where children may have very little agency over what happens to them, music therapists provide individualized music experiences that promote regulation, control, and autonomy, while honoring individual dignity, identity, and values.  Jacqueline (Jackie) Vilca, MT-BC, NICU-MT, has served as a music therapist at Lurie Children’s since 2022. She practices from an eclectic music therapy approach and provides services in English and Spanish. Jackie is one of five music therapists across the medical center, but the only one that serves the cochlear program.

Since the program began in March 2023, Jackie has had 77 sessions with patients. She serves patients at the main hospital as well as the Clark Deming and Northbrook outpatient centers. Jackie utilizes a number of interventions during sessions that include: musical attention control training, auditory perception training, developmental speech and language training through music, therapeutic singing and speech stimulation. Additionally, Jackie uses therapeutic musical experiences with patients including: music and movement, music with books, song improvisation, music relaxation, active music making/instrument playing, repetitive sounds for auditory exposure and auditory discrimination exercises. To scale her work and share her expertise even more, Jackie works closely with AR therapists to provide music therapy techniques that can be used in sessions when Jackie is not present. Jackie also scales her work by creating personalized supportive videos for caregiver education that include the topics of at-home-patient engagement, practicing aural skills through pre-recorded therapeutic musical experiences and caregiver education relating musical experiences to aural skills. Jackie has become a critical support to the cochlear team and complements our traditional medical care by providing an array of therapeutic benefits. 

Thanks to philanthropic support, Dr. Young has had the resources to pursue new and better answers to address hearing loss in children. Supported by five active awards, Dr. Young and her collaborators made significant research progress, including:

Completing their first year of a multi-site study of language prediction outcomes after cochlear implantation using artificial intelligence. While cochlear implants have been a gamechanger for improved hearing, maximizing language development after implantation remains a challenge as it can vary from child to child. As previously reported, this $3.5 million-funded National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders project aims to better predict individual-level language outcomes in English and Spanish-learning children up to four years after implantation.

Collecting data to expand candidacy for pediatric cochlear implantation to reach more and younger patients and provide treatment as early in life.

Dr. Young serves as lead PI of this multicenter FDA clinical trial sponsored by cochlear implant manufacturer MED-EL Corp. The study is investigating the safety and effectiveness of broadening audiologic criteria and age of implantation down to seven months. Broadening FDA-approved clinical indications has the potential to positively impact insurance coverage and increase access to this life-changing technology.

Using fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), a non-invasive imaging technology, to measure cortical activity of the brain in response to amplification and cochlear implantation.

This research-only imaging technology can be used to image the brain after cochlear implantation, something not possible with standard clinical imaging technology. fNIRS has the potential to further understanding of how the brain changes in response to cochlear implantation. It also has the potential to increase understanding of the impact of hearing aids on the brain, in a cost effective manner without use of sedation or general anesthesia. Using pilot data supported by philanthropy, the research group plans to submit a grant application to the NIH later this year.

Inventorship Recognized

In March 2023, Dr. Young and collaborators from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Patrick C.M. Wong and Gangyi Feng, were named inventors on a U.S. patent entitled “Neural Predictors of Language-Skill Outcomes in Cochlear Implantation Patients.” The patent is based upon pilot data from brain MRI studies that the investigators used to build an AI machine, learning-enabled model to predict language after cochlear implantation.

Accolades and Honors

During the past year, Dr. Young distinguished herself by receiving a number of awards and honors, including the Voice From the Heart Award presented by Child’s Voice School, a private Illinois school that empowers children with hearing loss to be successful in educational and social settings by optimizing their listening, speaking and academic skills. The award honors individuals who have given dedicated service to the school. She was honored to give the 2023 Howard P. House, MD, Memorial Lecture for Advances in Otology at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery. Her presentation was entitled: “Precision Medicine to Improve Outcome: Neurocognitive Machine Learning Enabled Language Prediction for Children with Hearing Loss.”

Finally, in 2023 Dr. Young also shared her expertise on childhood hearing loss at Stanford University’s Department of Otolaryngology Grand Rounds and at the 14th Asia Pacific Symposium on Cochlear Implant and Related Sciences in Seoul, South Korea. Additionally, she completed editing the second edition of her textbook: Pediatric Cochlear Implantation Learning and the Brain which is scheduled for publication in 2024.