Hearing loss is a common health problem in Alaska. Up to 75% of children growing up in Alaskan villages experience frequent ear infections, one of the major treatable causes of hearing loss. Children with even mild hearing loss face many challenges. These children often experience speech and language delays and have trouble in school. Teens with hearing loss are more likely to drop out of school, and are at risk for having difficulty finding jobs as adults. Promptly diagnosing and treating hearing loss is important for preventing these consequences. Alaska mandates school-based hearing screening, but many children with hearing loss are not identified by the current screening protocol, and most who are referred never make it into the healthcare system for diagnosis and treatment.

Alaska has already developed innovative strategies to address hearing loss. A network of village health clinics staffed by community health aides provide local care, and telemedicine has been adopted in over 250 village clinics statewide. Despite being widely available, telemedicine has not yet been used in school hearing screenings to speed up the referral process.

Norton Sound Health Corporation has partnered with Duke and Johns Hopkins Universities to explore whether a new school screening and referral process that incorporates mobile, or mHealth, screening and telemedicine referral will reduce childhood hearing loss disparities in the Norton Sound region. Children from kindergarten through 12th grade in 15 Norton Sound villages will receive the current school screening protocol and the new mHealth screen. Villages will then be randomized to continue the current primary care referral process or to adopt telemedicine referral for school screenings. The investigators hypothesize that the new mHealth screening protocol will identify more children with hearing loss, and telemedicine referral will reduce time to diagnosis. By better identifying hearing loss and speeding up diagnosis and treatment, the investigators expect the burden of childhood hearing loss to drop, hearing-related quality of life to improve, and school performance to improve in villages with telemedicine referral compared to current primary care referral villages. If the study shows these positive effects, mHealth screening and the telemedicine referral process could be implemented in school districts across the state of Alaska to reducing childhood hearing loss disparities statewide.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Student of the Bering Strait School District (BSSD) in Alaska
• All school-aged children, from Kindergarten through 12th grade in the school district are eligible to participate
• Parental signed consent to undergo routine hearing screening in the school setting
• Verbal assent from children enrolled in the study

Exclusion Criteria:

• Not a student of the Bering Strait School District
• Parental consent for routine hearing screening not obtained
• Verbal assent not obtained

The randomization assignments will be kept confidential within the study team until hearing screening day, when masking the referral process assignment will no longer be possible. All outcome assessors, including audiologists and ear, nose, and throat (ENT) surgeons reading telemedicine consults within the Alaska Native healthcare system and study team members performing medical record abstraction, will be masked to intervention allocation. Study team members who read telemedicine consults as a part of their clinical responsibilities will abstain from reading any study-related consults. The results of the school screen, mHealth screen, and audiometric assessments will also be masked, such that study team members performing the mHealth screen or audiometric assessment will be masked to the other results.