Our mission and story

Our mission

The Ida Institute’s mission is to build a community that embraces person-centered care and empowers people to get the hearing care they need. Together with clinicians, academics, and people with hearing loss, we work to create resources that help people develop knowledge, skills, and confidence to better manage hearing loss.

Our story

The Ida Institute was founded in 2007 with the belief that people with hearing loss should be at the center of hearing care. We believe that their unique needs, values, and preferences should be taken into account and that they should make decisions about treatment and strategies jointly with their hearing care professional. We also believe they should be informed and empowered to manage their condition in daily life.

This type of care is called person-centered care and it differs significantly from the traditional biomedical model, where the hearing condition is seen only as a medical issue that must be diagnosed and fixed. The person-centered approach instead is holistic, engages the person in their own care, and combines amplification with communication strategies for the best outcomes.

Since 2007, the concept and practice of person-centered care has moved from the sidelines to center stage across healthcare, supported by mounting evidence of the benefits for patients, professionals, providers, and broader society. 

Hearing care has seen the same shift, with this approach now integrated into countless national and international standards, embedded in curricula and training programs around the world, and implemented in an ever-growing number of public and private hearing clinics.

The Ida Institute has been a key player in these developments by:

  • collaborating with a diverse global community of experts to create free-to-access counseling tools and learning resources that build skills and help clinicians implement person-centered hearing care; 
  • working with our 31 partners to create a global network of clinicians, academics, industry, and people with hearing loss that embraces the person-centered approach;
  • supporting groundbreaking research into person-centered hearing rehabilitation;
  • and contributing to the creation of audiological guidelines and standards around the world.

Creating real-world solutions

Since its inception, the Ida Institute has focused on creating real-world solutions to real-world problems. Inspired by the anthropological approach, we travel to hearing care clinics all over the world to speak with people with hearing loss and clinicians and identify the most pressing needs. We then invite key experts and stakeholders from across the global hearing care landscape to innovation seminars to design solutions together.

Every year, the resources we create – addressing topics as diverse as motivational engagement, pediatric rehabilitation, and tinnitus counseling – are accessed by tens of thousands of people across 150+ countries.

These resources include an unparalleled library of short documentaries providing current and future hearing care professionals, researchers, and industry with unique insights into audiological practice and the everyday lives of people with hearing loss.

Educating for the future

We know that educating the next generation of hearing care professionals is vital to achieving a person-centered revolution in audiology. 

In 2010 we launched the Ida University Course, now integrated into 30+ universities across six continents. We followed this in 2019 with an online learning platform – the Ida Learning Hall – where 14,000+ current and future professionals access free, accredited courses created by the Ida Institute in collaboration with renowned experts.

Collaborating across stakeholder groups

We also know that no single organization can generate the hearing care revolution that is needed. Hence our 31 partnerships with professional associations, consumer organizations, universities, and research institutes around the world. 

Together we are the Person-Centered Hearing Network (PCHN), a powerful vehicle for concrete projects to spread awareness and practice of person-centered hearing care and for the exchange of knowledge and ideas within and across stakeholder groups.

Through grants, we also support pioneering research into hearing rehabilitation within our network and beyond.

Looking ahead

In recent years, we have expanded our operations into new and growing markets, including Brazil and China, and together with our partners, turned our eyes to the future. Employing proven methods from the field of futures studies and gathering insights from across our networks, we mapped the hearing care landscape 5-10 years ahead and created resources to help key stakeholder groups prepare.