At Geldwert Bunion Center, we believe the best medical innovations are the ones patients actually use. To that end, we recently sat down with Dr. Trinker, Head of Audiology at Audien Hearing, the #1 best-selling over-the-counter hearing aid brand in the United States. Audien’s perspective tracks closely with how we think about our own work, so we asked Dr. Trinker about designing care around real patient lives, and what it takes to build a hearing solution people genuinely adopt.
Q: How do you balance advanced hearing technology with the need for a product to feel simple and intuitive to the person using it?
A: Technology only earns its place if the person wearing the device can get value from it without friction. At Audien, we think about that from the very first interaction. Our hearing aids are explicitly designed so that setup doesn’t require a clinical appointment or technical expertise. Features like environmental sound modes or personalized hearing profiles are there to enhance the user’s day, not to add steps to it. If a feature creates confusion, it’s not doing its job, no matter how sophisticated the engineering behind it.
Q: Our team measures success by how quickly and fully patients return to their normal activities. Does Audien think about patient outcomes in a similar way?
A: That framing resonates with us. The thing we care most about is whether someone is participating more fully in their life after using our products. That means rejoining conversations they had been quietly withdrawing from, feeling confident in group settings again, hearing grandchildren clearly. Those are the outcomes our customers describe when they tell us something changed for them. Sales data simply tells you people bought a product; customer outcomes tell you whether it actually worked.
Q: How has customer feedback shaped the way Audien’s products have evolved over time?
A: Customer feedback is probably the most reliable signal we have. The average person waits over 10 years between noticing hearing changes and taking action, which means by the time someone comes to Audien, they’ve lived with the problem for a long time and they know exactly what they need. We hear from customers about what feels awkward to use, what surprises them (in a good way), and what they wish worked differently. That input directly influences how we approach product development, from battery life specifications to how we structure onboarding. Minutes of real-world use can surface things that even years of internal testing won’t catch.
Q: What role does confidence and social connection play in the value of a hearing solution?
A: It’s often why people seek out hearing aids in the first place! Hearing loss tends to be a gradual and private experience. People compensate for it quietly, often by withdrawing from situations that feel unpredictable, loud restaurants, group gatherings, phone calls. When that happens, the change in confidence is significant. Customers tell us that being able to follow a conversation without asking people to repeat themselves completely changes how they live their lives.
Q: What has building a healthcare product around your customers’ lives taught you that you couldn’t have learned from the clinical side alone?
A: It’s reinforced that access and simplicity are outcomes in their own right. A hearing aid that requires multiple appointments, a complicated fitting process, or a high upfront cost is a hearing aid many people won’t have access to, or find too complicated, regardless of how well it performs in a lab setting. At Audien, we’ve built an over-the-counter model specifically to remove those barriers. When you design around the customer’s actual life, you end up making different decisions than you would if you were designing around specifications alone.
To learn more about Audien’s product line, visit https://www.audienhearing.com/