Designing the Future of Hearing Healthcare

By Timothy Cooke

By 2020, patient-hearing care professional relationships and health care delivery may look significantly different than it does today. The future may include scenarios where telemedicine, virtual care, self-fitting hearing instruments, and personal health avatars are an everyday part of hearing healthcare.

While these scenarios may present many challenges to the profession, they also represent an opportunity for the profession to build a strong bridge to the future that recognizes the importance of the human dynamics of hearing loss.

To take advantage of this opportunity, the Ida Institute plans to hold a conference titled “Creating the Future of Hearing Healthcare: Vision 2020”. The conference aims to create a global vision of hearing healthcare and an action plan to achieve this vision.

“With this conference, we want to harness the skills, knowledge, and energy of our growing global community to design a vision for hearing healthcare that makes patient-centered care the core of daily practice,” said Managing Direction Lise Lotte Bundesen.

To include global and diverse perspectives, three satellite meetings will take place in the United States, Australia, and the UK before the final conference in Denmark in February 2014. Participants at the satellite meetings will identify the changes occurring in healthcare, explore the skills and knowledge they can leverage to shape the future, and create a vision for what the future could look like.

At the final conference, previous Ida advisory board and seminar faculty members will synthesize and organize the ideas from the satellite meetings and work together to create a roadmap for the future.   

We are collaborating with Louise Hickson (Aus), Terry Chisholm (US) and Adam Beckman (UK) on the conference and they will host the satellite meetings in their respective countries.