Hearing Service

Dr. Elizabeth Welch has worked to help those with hearing loss for nearly three decades. 

“I just love being able to change the quality of people’s lives,” she says. “And I love the relationships with our patients. We’re not just here to sell a product or service; when you walk into our office, you feel like you’re walking into a family.”

Welch owns HearTN. For a number of years, it was called Hearing Services of Franklin, but when she began opening offices to serve other communities, it made sense to change the name. HearTN now has offices in Franklin, Spring Hill, Chattanooga, Dickson, Nolensville, Tullahoma, and Trenton, Georgia.

“We saw some of these smaller, more rural communities just didn’t have quality hearing healthcare,” Welch explains. “So, we decided it was a good move for us.”

Welch and her staff offer a wide range of services, all geared toward educating and equipping people with the tools to protect and maintain proper hearing. Often, when you think of hearing loss, the first thing that comes to mind is older patients who might need hearing aids, but HearTN serves people of all ages with a variety of needs.

“I like to tell people hearing loss is not a respecter of age,” Welch says. “Yes, it’s more common as we get older. I think the statistic is one-in-three when you’re 65 years old, but it’s also one-in-twenty in school-age kids. And that doesn’t mean hearing loss can’t be corrected with surgery or with tubes in the ears. So, we deal with all ages.

Welch recommends a baseline hearing test for everyone. While kids usually get tested in school, once people enter adulthood, they can go for decades without having another one.

“A baseline hearing test is always a good idea, no matter how old you are. And most insurances cover a hearing test, many of them annually.

For children in school, testing beyond the basic hearing test can determine whether kids who might be struggling in the classroom have auditory processing disorder.

“We see a lot of that in school-age children,” says Welch. “It’s like, ‘I hear everything you’re saying, I have completely normal hearing, but it’s just processing, it’s just not clicking.’ So, a lot of times parents think their kids have hearing loss when, in fact, they hear just fine; it’s the way they’re processing that information. We do that kind of testing, as well.”

HearTN can help with many other things as well. 

“We do management for tinnitus, which is ringing in the head or noises in the head, basically. We see a lot of that with the musician population here in the Nashville area. We do musician monitors to help protect their hearing, we do noise plugs for hunters or spouses who snore, swim plugs for children who have tubes in their ears, and we do balance testing for people who have vertigo, along with treatment.”

With regard to the older population, Welch notes there’s a strong correlation between hearing loss and cognitive decline. And when you don’t treat the hearing loss, the rate of cognitive decline is increased.

And for patients who need hearing aids, technology has come a long way in making them smaller, more efficient, and user-friendly.

“Hearing aids are so tiny now, you can hardly see them,” says Welch. “And most of them have AI features in them now, deep neural network (we call it DNN), so processing is so much better today than it was even five or six years ago. Almost all of them are rechargeable today, and most of them are Bluetooth compatible, so you can listen to your phone.”

Welch is passionate about helping people hear better, and it does so with a dedicated, caring staff that feels the same way. 

“As a business owner, I couldn’t be more blessed with the staff I have. They are ‘my people.’ I love them, and I trust them. I get to go to work every day with people I genuinely enjoy working with.”

For more information or to schedule an appointment, visit https://heartn.com/