Jamie Loschen, Au.D., CCC-A

“After spending much of my career commuting off-island to provide hearing care across Cape Cod and beyond, I opened Island Hearing Services so I could serve this community full-time.”

Ten years on the island, and a decade of commuting off it

Dr. Loschen has lived on Martha’s Vineyard for more than ten years. For much of that time the way to practise audiology and live here was to do what a great many islanders do about work — get on the boat. She spent years providing hearing care across Cape Cod and beyond, on the wrong side of the sound from her own house.

Island Hearing Services exists because that arrangement is the wrong way round. The island has an ageing year-round population, a summer population several times its size, and a working population of people who spend their lives around engines and power tools. It has, in other words, an unusually large amount of hearing to look after and, since the ENT and audiology office closed, an unusually small number of people to look after it.

Training and background

Dr. Loschen earned both her undergraduate and her doctoral degrees in audiology from the University of Northern Colorado, and holds the Certificate of Clinical Competence in Audiology (CCC-A). She has more than a decade of experience in private practice and in ENT settings.

She has also worked as a clinical education specialist for a major hearing aid manufacturer — which is a genuinely useful thing to have done, because it means she has seen how these devices are designed, marketed and taught from the inside. It is a large part of why this practice fits all seven majors rather than becoming an outlet for one of them.

What a small practice is actually for

There is no front desk, no rotating clinician, no upstairs. You see the same person for the test, the fitting, the follow-up and the repair three years later. When you call about a device that has stopped working, the person who set it up is the person who picks up.

It also means appointments are not eight minutes long. A first evaluation runs about an hour, most of which is not the test — it is the conversation about what the result means and what, if anything, you want to do about it.

Outside the clinic

Beaches, trails, and Gordon the goldendoodle, in roughly that order. After ten years she is well past the point of being from somewhere else, which matters more here than it does in most places — the person testing your hearing has stood in the same ferry line, in the same February.

Where to find the practice · What an evaluation involves