Dr. Rebecca Lewis’s clinical, research, and leadership work centers on improving hearing health outcomes through patient-centered care, data-informed practice, and more accessible systems of care. As an audiologist and clinical leader, she works across the continuum of adult hearing healthcare, with particular expertise in cochlear implants, hearing aids, auditory rehabilitation, and complex hearing needs. Her clinical approach emphasizes careful listening, detailed history-taking, individualized treatment planning, and longitudinal follow-up that reflects each patient’s communication goals, lived experience, language needs, technology use, and broader health context.
Dr. Lewis’s scholarly work focuses on strengthening the bridge between clinical audiology, outcomes research, quality improvement, and informatics. She is especially interested in how structured documentation, minimum datasets, clinical workflows, and data standards can support better care, more meaningful quality measurement, and research-ready audiology practice. Her research examines predictors of hearing aid and cochlear implant outcomes, including candidacy measures, speech perception results, patient-reported outcomes, and other objective and subjective indicators of benefit. She has also explored innovative auditory measures, including harmonic consonance-dissonance perception, as part of a broader effort to refine how audiologists understand and measure real-world listening outcomes.
A major focus of Dr. Lewis’s current work is building learning health system infrastructure for audiology: systems in which routine clinical care, patient education, quality improvement, and research can continuously inform one another. This includes developing clinician-friendly tools, improving audiology documentation workflows, supporting data capture for outcomes and equity, and advancing practical approaches to clinical informatics in hearing healthcare. Her work reflects a commitment to making audiology not only more technologically advanced, but also more measurable, scalable, equitable, and responsive to patient needs.
Dr. Lewis is also deeply engaged in expanding access to high-quality hearing health information through UCSF EARS, a multilingual digital patient education platform designed to help patients and families better understand hearing loss, tinnitus, balance concerns, hearing technology, and care options. Through this work, she develops accessible educational content, interactive tools, and digital workflows that support patient understanding, shared decision-making, care navigation, and preparation for clinical visits. UCSF EARS also reflects her broader interest in how patient education, structured data capture, artificial intelligence, automation, and clinical informatics can work together to reduce barriers to care and support a more responsive learning health system.
In addition to her clinical and scholarly work, Dr. Lewis mentors clinicians, students, and collaborators interested in audiology innovation, quality improvement, and health systems change. She welcomes cross-institutional collaboration aimed at improving clinical outcomes, building better audiology data infrastructure, and translating research into practical improvements in care. Across her work, Dr. Lewis’s goal is to help audiology evolve into a more integrated, patient-centered, evidence-generating field that can better serve individuals with hearing loss and the systems that care for them.