In this article, we take the example of a hearing screening
program for all births with transient evoked otoacoustic emissions
in all eight maternity hospitals in the state of Rhode Island
over a 4-year period during 1993–1996 as an application of the
binomial prediction interval. The goal of this hearing screening
program is to ensure that all infants and toddlers with hearing
loss are identified as early as possible and provided with
timely and appropriate audiological, educational, and medical
intervention. This example contains hearing screening data collected
prospectively for 47,991 normal nursery liveborns born
in Rhode Island between January 1, 1993 and December 31,
1996 (Vohr et al. 1998). The prediction interval can be used
to predict the number of children with hearing loss for future
years. Since the time period considered here is not large, we
can assume that the number of children with hearing loss follows
the same binomial distribution in each year.