Specifically, the committee will:

• Identify and engage appropriate partners, including relevant federal agencies, the academic/professional community of researchers and clinicians, professional organizations, industry, and patient/consumer groups, to gain their perspectives as inputto committee deliberations.
• Provide a brief contextual background describing the contribution of hearing to overall health and well-being, the etiology of hearing loss, the personal and societal costs of untreated hearing loss, the benefits of treatment for hearing loss, and disparities in treatment.
• Broadly describe the various interventions (e.g., hearing aids, rehabilitative strategies or training, pharmaceutical or biological therapies, etc.).
• Describe the outcome measures currently available to assess hearing function and communication in adults, available measures in outcome domains beyond communication (e.g., social connectivity, activity limitations, participation restrictions, economic productivity) that should be measured, and gaps where development of new outcome measures is urgently needed.
• ldentify in which settings the metrics are most applicable (e.g., establishing efficacy in clinical trials, assessing patient response in clinical care and by type of intervention, conducting hearing health monitoring, assessing patient satisfaction).

• Provide recommendations on the standardized use of existing outcome measuresfor hearing health, including hearing, communication, and other domains (“core set of measures”), andthe necessary qualities and strategies for adoption of new meaningful measures that could be implemented in the short term as well as longer timeframes with an eye toward large-scale adoption and standardization (e.g., national databases and repositories).

In the circumstance where robust evidence is lacking or absent, the committee is encouraged to make recommendations based on sound scientific reasoning in the context of the current healthcare environment.