Enhancing Tinnitus Care Pathway Through Collaborative Research
A new type of digital care pathway for patients with tinnitus is being tested through a research collaboration between Flinders University, a leading academic institution in South Australia, and healthcare company The Clinician.
The pathway will enable individuals to digitally report their experiences with specific hearing interventions as well as patient-reported tinnitus severity, to help evaluate the effectiveness of treatment for patients and measure engagement with different digital interventions.
The research collaboration is being led by Flinders University’s Professor Raj Shekhawat (Dean of Research, College of Education, Psychology and Social work) and PhD candidate Boaz Mui, who will work with The Clinician team’s ZEDOC technology platform to collect and analyse patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) that are specific to patients with tinnitus.
The ZEDOC platform will enable individuals to be automatically sent personalised PROMs and PREMs that can be completed on their own devices. Providing such information from home will help reduce the collection burden facing clinical teams while delivering high-quality and complete patient-centred health data for analysis.
Professor Shekhawat says the research collaboration will enable an improved tinnitus care pathway due to the efficiency of improved digital technology. “It is a very efficient, intuitive and productive way to collect, visualise and manage research data across different collaborators,” he says.
The Clinician’s Business and Research Development Manager Natasha Tan says the testing process will provide effective digital tools that help streamline research processes.
“This partnership with Professor Shekhawat’s team at Flinders University will allow researchers to collect patient-centred outcomes that can lead to high quality care and provide better support for tinnitus patients,” she says.
“By joining forces, this collaboration holds the potential to revolutionise research practices, enhance patient outcomes and foster innovative treatment developments within the audiology space.”
After completing an initial validation period of the ZEDOC platform, Flinders University and The Clinician will explore future collaboration opportunities that can extend the pathway to include measurement and validation of more digital health interventions.