Thread

Healthcare has become outstandingly specialised. The move towards specialisation has saved lives and advanced medicine, and it has also created a growing problem for individuals whose symptoms don’t fit neatly within a specialty box. Tinnitus is a striking example, with over 15% of the world's population affected, most of whom remain underserved by current care models. With the most prevalent current tinnitus care model, patients usually encounter an audiologist, ENT, neurologist, physiotherapist, or psychologist — and then the line ends, even though there may be many more qualified specialists to see, if the aforementioned have yielded little to no results. Patients are most commonly left to work out who they need, why they need them, and how those practitioners should connect, by themselves. Most patients have neither the expertise nor the mental and/or financial capacity to do so. At the same time, practitioners working with complex presentations seldom encounter opportunities to learn across disciplines or build meaningful international referral networks. Phonisk is being built to change both of these conundrums. We are starting with tinnitus, by building infrastructure to connect patients with qualified practitioners, locally and via telemedicine, while providing those practitioners with education, certification, licensing, and an international interdisciplinary professional network. The question that drives us is: “How do we build healthcare infrastructure around the complexity of the patient, instead of expecting the patient to navigate the complexity of healthcare?”