Hearing care keeps getting harder to staff. Here is why the shortage hits ENT practices hardest and what actually fixes it.
Audiology is one of the most under-supplied roles in healthcare.
57%
of U.S. counties have zero audiologists
75%
of U.S. counties report an audiology shortage
83%
increase in hearing professionals, 2012 to 2022
And supply is clustered in metro areas, leaving large parts of the country with almost no local coverage.
Sources: Social Science & Medicine, 2019; American Academy of Audiology, 2025.
An open audiology role takes 6 to 9 months on average to fill. Until it is filled, the hearing-care department often runs at or below breakeven. And in a typical ENT practice only a handful of the roles on the org chart are revenue-generating, so a single unfilled audiology seat has an outsized effect on the bottom line.
The patients are already in your practice. In a typical ENT chart the number of patients with untreated sensorineural hearing loss is many times the number who ever get fit with a hearing device. Every month a chair sits empty is a month those patients go unserved, and the revenue with them.
Raising comp and posting the role wider does not change the fact that there are not enough audiologists to go around. The structural fix is to change how care is delivered: a managed staffing model that provides and flexibly scales audiology coverage across your locations, so a hiring gap never becomes a care gap.
Virsono is built around exactly this managed-staffing model. We help ENT practices run a full hearing-care service line without carrying the full staffing burden, so the department keeps serving patients even in a tight labor market.
Five fields, thirty seconds, a side-by-side estimate.
