Pitt professors’ work was acknowledged by the FDA commissioner

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf and Debara Tucci, director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, recognized University of Pittsburgh professors for their work on increasing access to hearing aids through community pharmacies.

Califf and Tucci penned an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on the FDA’s new category for over-the-counter hearing aids, which they said will ease market entry for new hearing technology.

In response, Luke Berenbrok, associate professor of pharmacy and therapeutics in Pitt’s School of Pharmacy and Elaine Mormer, director of audiology clinical education in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, also took to JAMA to explain the importance of community pharmacists in ensuring the safe and effective use of OTC hearing aids.

[Here’s how Berenbrok and Mormer are working to educate and empower pharmacists.]

Accessibility and proximity — nearly 90% of people in the U.S. live within a 5-mile driving distance of a pharmacy — make them “ideal locations to provide patient-centered, clinical services that are important to public health,” Berenbrok and Mormer wrote.

Califf and Tucci, in a final JAMA reply, recognized the community pharmacy care-delivery model researchers at Pitt are promoting. "We agree with Berenbrok and Mormer that this represents a promising approach," they wrote.