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What if We Managed Tinnitus Differently?

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Jeffery Reagan's journey from surviving a heart transplant to pioneering tinnitus care innovation offers a masterclass in turning personal adversity into meaningful healthcare transformation. After experiencing a heart attack on Mount Kilimanjaro in 2007, followed by a catastrophic cardiac event in 2011 that left him dependent on a mechanical heart for three years, Reagan gained profound appreciation for patient-centered healthcare excellence. When he later developed tinnitus himself, he recognized the same fragmented care patterns that plague many chronic conditions.

The tragic 2021 suicide of Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor due to severe tinnitus became Reagan's watershed moment. Having never realized tinnitus could drive someone to such desperation, Reagan committed to leveraging his unique background in data modeling and healthcare systems to create something revolutionary: the Tinnitus Learning Health Network (formerly Stop the Ring).

Unlike traditional advocacy organizations, Reagan's approach places patients at the center while fostering structured collaboration between clinicians and researchers – what he calls "the golden triad." This learning health network doesn't focus solely on research but rather on measurable outcomes using quality improvement techniques that have proven successful in other medical fields. By collecting comprehensive data across demographics, tinnitus subtypes, and treatment interventions, the network identifies patterns that help match specific patient subgroups with the most effective care approaches.

With renowned experts like Dr. James Henry and Dr. Donna Murray on his team, Reagan is building what he describes as a "near real-time clinical practice guideline" – one that evolves monthly based on actual patient outcomes rather than being updated once per decade. The vision includes establishing pilot sites by 2026, growing to 30-50 locations within five years, and ultimately securing insurance coverage for the 50 million Americans affected by tinnitus.

For those suffering in silence after being told "there's nothing we can do," Reagan's message resonates powerfully: there is hope, there are effective management strategies, and through better data and collaboration, we can transform tinnitus care forever. Listen to discover how this groundbreaking approach could finally bring relief to millions.

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Speaker 1:

Thank you to our partners. Cycle built for the entire hearing care practice. Caption call by Sorenson. Life is calling CareCredit. Here today to help more people hear tomorrow. Faderplugs the world's first custom adjustable earplug. Welcome back to another episode of the Hearing Matters podcast. I'm founder and host, blaise Delfino, and, as a friendly reminder, this podcast is separate from my work at Starkey. Welcome back to the Hearing Matters podcast. Today we're diving into a topic that impacts over 50 million Americans tinnitus. For many, it's a daily struggle with no clear answers, but my guest today, jeffrey Reagan, is working to change that. Jeff is not only a heart transplant survivor and tinnitus patient himself, but also the founder of Stop the Ring, a nonprofit leading the change to revolutionize tinnitus care. Through the first ever Tinnitus Learning Health Network, he's bringing together patients, clinicians and researchers to break down silos, share data and drive real solutions for those living with tinnitus. We'll talk about Jeff's remarkable personal journey, the mission behind Stop the Ring and how his leadership is helping reshape the future of tinnitus care. Jeff, welcome to the Hearing Matters podcast.

Speaker 2:

Thanks so much, Blaise. A pleasure to be on the show and thanks for the invite.

Speaker 1:

Jeff, you and I have been connecting now for a couple of months talking about this episode and to ensure the information that we share with our community really supports Stop the Ring and the mission and what we want our listeners to walk away with after they tune in to this episode, and I'm really liking the structure of the show that we have set up for our listeners. So let's dive into, jeff, your journey to advocacy. Let's dive into, jeff, your journey to advocacy. You've shared with me your personal story I Ring Sure.

Speaker 2:

It's a pretty long story but I'll try and keep it short for the listeners here today. My journey really didn't begin with tinnitus, it just so happened. That's part of the journey now. But my personal healthcare journey began unexpectedly for me. I was an avid outdoors person, climbed some of the highest mountains in the United States and then tackled Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa in 2007. So as I got near the top I ran out of gas and I thought, wow, this is kind of nuts. And as it turned out, I was having a heart attack on the mountain. I didn't realize it, but I thought it was altitude sickness. So I came back to the States, was misdiagnosed with GERD-induced asthma. This is in 2007.

Speaker 2:

Fast forward to 2011,. Four years later I actually did have a massive heart attack. I was living in Columbus in Ohio and they couldn't keep me alive at a level one trauma center. So I was air-cared at the the Cleveland Clinic and I was not a candidate for transplant at that time. I was placed on end of life support for 20 days on an ECMO machine and finally they decided they had to operate, because you can only stay in ECMO for a couple of weeks before clots can form in the machine, and so I was given a respite, if you will, a temporary solution, a left ventricular assist device, which essentially is a mechanical heart inserted in your body. So for three years, blaze, I was a bionic human being. I didn't have a pulse, I was battery powered, but I wore a vest that concealed the batteries and went back to work. And finally, in 2014, I received the gift of life a human heart. I will tell you, walking into the ICU is better than being carried into the ICU on a stretcher.

Speaker 2:

But anyway, to take away from all this, I learned from the great care that I received that I wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for people doing their job in an extreme, high level of excellence. This goes all the way from the person mopping the hospital floors keeping germs away to nurses drawing blood and being empathetic to the surgeon who placed the heart into my body the whole value chain, custody of chain of my body. I thought, wow, what if one person didn't do their job correctly? I wouldn't be here. So that kind of set the tone for how I viewed health care, because prior to that, I never was really in health care. I wouldn't be here. So that kind of set the tone for how I viewed healthcare, because prior to that I never was really in healthcare. I led a pretty healthy life. So that set the tone and that just carried over to where I am with tinnitus today. But I think you want to talk about that in a different kind of way, so I'll throw it back to you.

Speaker 1:

Well, jeff, that must have been for lack of a better term a very scary time in your life. The unknown how do I respond to this? To go three years, that's a long time. That is absolutely a long time. We know that oftentimes patients who present with tinnitus might battle anxiety, depression. What brought you through that challenging time? Mentally? You were going back to work, so I'm sure that was also stressful. How did you get through that dark time?

Speaker 2:

It was very difficult, I think, having family and friends nearby, a support structure, belief in God, being lucky enough to have the best heart care possible in the United States and praying for better days ahead and believing in better days ahead to get through that time. And I actually wrote John McCain a letter because he served as a POW for five years in Vietnam. He didn't have pretty nurses looking over him, so I wrote him a letter thanking him for service to our country and I can only imagine what he went through. Mine was simple compared to what he did, so it gave me strength and faith and I just truly believe that there were better days ahead. I fought for those days and here they are, you know, 14 years later.

Speaker 1:

And you're taking that experience and you're paying it forward because you personally know what it's like to go through. You know being a heart transplant recipient living with tinnitus yourself, and you and your team at Stop the Ring know that there is a challenge and a problem that needs to be solved, and I really I'm excited to dive deep into that with you today. I'd like to dive into the watershed moment. No pun intended there, but you've shared that the tragic passing of Kent Taylor in 2021 was really a turning point for you. Can you walk us through that moment and why that moment compelled you to act and really begin pushing for a tinnitus learning health network?

Speaker 2:

Sure, I presented with unilateral right-sided tinnitus first in 2017, and then later started developing the left side. But I thought about creating a learning health network for tinnitus because I'd been exposed to the framework at Cincinnati Children's Hospital when I did volunteer work for them. After my transplant, I provided project management and data modeling experience to the hospital and I learned of the framework there and I intuitively saw how powerful it was. And I thought about standing up at the Tinnitus Learning Health Network in 2020, but really didn't act on it. And then I thought in 2021, I'm really going to do this. But this watershed moment, as you pointed out, blaze, is that when Kent Taylor committed suicide, he was a very visible person. I didn't realize at that time that people could commit suicide from tinnitus. That told me that this really is a debilitating condition that needs to be addressed because, as you pointed out, over 50 million Americans are affected by it and 1% to 2% of those are really debilitated by it. Right, but again, that was the moment that I decided to really get involved.

Speaker 1:

So much to unpack there. I think that too often the majority of those living with tinnitus may not realize that it's a scale how severe is your tinnitus? And that's why it's so important that we have these conversations, because and that's why it's so important that we have these conversations because we have to do better in terms of raising awareness. It relates to tinnitus management and whether it be TRT, training and of the like but to educate our community on what tinnitus is, how it can affect patients differently, and that there is this severity scale. Some patients might say well, I have a mild case of tinnitus, it doesn't affect my everyday activities. But on the other side, I can say this is debilitating to me.

Speaker 1:

Jeff, you and your team, the problem you're trying to solve is raising awareness of these learning health networks. Cue stop the Ring. So for listeners who may be hearing about Stop the Ring for the first time, what is this nonprofit Stop the Ring and how does it differ from traditional tinnitus advocacy efforts? Because there is a lot of them out there, but yours is absolutely different.

Speaker 2:

Right. We truly believe we are different. Blaze, where we come in is a learning health network, by nature, doesn't focus specifically on research. It focuses on outcomes and it uses quality improvement techniques performance improvement techniques that have been vetted and scientifically proven in many other learning health networks. So while research is very important, also within a learning health network, the primary focus is on helping the patients get the best type of treatment that suits them best. That means finding out patient subtypes and subgroups and making sure they get the best interventions that empirically have been shown through evidence to work for those types of patients. So you know we do fundraising the same way other tinnitus organizations do. We reach out to industry people like Microsoft and Apple and what have you. So there's a mix of funding that can help us get to the next level funding that can help us get to the next level. But we are quite different from the other organizations in that we have a very structured approach that has been proven out for over 20 years now and many other learning health networks.

Speaker 1:

Jeff, just from our past conversations, what I gather from you is you are a data wizard. You understand data, but not only understanding it your ability to read it and then apply what that data means to solve a problem. And to me, that's what I'm seeing, what you and the team are doing at Stop the Ring, so you're focused on outcomes. Before we dive a little bit deeper into that, you know, in terms of your leadership and collaboration and the patient voice being at the center of these learning health networks, you've been immersed in these learning health networks since your time volunteering at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. How in the world do these networks actually work? And, as it relates to tinnitus care, why do you believe there's such a game changer? Great question.

Speaker 2:

The crux of a lot of this is actually collecting data. You know people have different approaches to solve different problems, but rarely are you able to collect all the data in one place where it can be sliced and diced by demographic, for example, by other types of patient subgroups, and slice and dice also by tinnitus subtypes, and then, thirdly, slice and dice by the types of interventions that might be used for those particular patients. So learning health networks are really think of it as three main actors. The patient at the center is. Again, we're focusing on patient outcomes, but as legs to that, what I call the golden triad, are clinicians who are on the front line. I mean, you've been a clinician for many years. You guys serve on the front lines in terms of diagnosing patients and treating patients. And then the other leg is the research leg and again, while we're not a research organization, that is part of it.

Speaker 2:

So essentially it's three main actors working together in what I would say is a working community and they all share best practices across the network Because in the past, and they all share best practices across the network because in the past we've had silent research.

Speaker 2:

This way patients can actually have a voice into what type of research gets done. For example, over the last eight months we have sent out questionnaires to almost a dozen patient support groups and by far away the largest request was do research to reduce loudness of tinnitus, right, right, and there was plenty of other answers too, but far and away that was the biggest response that we got. So what we want to do is involve patients more, amplify the voice of the patient and also allow for this collaboration between researchers, clinicians and patients. So that's how a learning health network works at an eye level, and when you get multiple clinics involved, talking to each other, then they can compare notes and improve not only improve the quality of care, but reduce the disparity of care. Those are the two big wins you improve the quality of care and you reduce the disparity of care.

Speaker 1:

Jeff. So much to unpack there what I'm hearing. From a clinical standpoint, I love the fact that the patient is at the center, because the patient should always be at the center, not only in hearing healthcare but healthcare in general. But I see this as a way that you're building community and you're able to connect patients with providers who are implementing best practices. And best practices have been around for many, many, many, many years in hearing healthcare. It's nothing new.

Speaker 1:

Unfortunately, too many hearing care professionals have not been implementing best practices. So I love this overall holistic approach. The hearing care professionals are being pragmatic about their implementation of best practices. But these patients then are in a community and are able to then connect with others who present with tinnitus as well. And I believe you had mentioned, you know, light at the end of the tunnel when you were going through your pre-heart transplant and having faith and just being connected and having that belief. I feel as though counseling patients who do present with tinnitus a lot of it is counseling cognitive behavioral therapy, so leaning into that community has to yield great patient outcomes you have to present hope, as we all know, because if you don't present hope what we've heard people say, and many patients say, we're tired of hearing there's nothing we can do for you.

Speaker 2:

right, when we know that there's therapies that do work TRT works, cbt works, you know, some sound therapy works. People get relief from hearing aids. So there's many different options. What may work for one patient might not work for another, but the bottom line is we do have options, that hope has to be presented to patients, right?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, absolutely, and this is my disclaimer here. You know, for hearing care professionals tuned in right now and this is a conversation that I had with Dr Alex Tarvin from Elevate Audiology in South Carolina. Actually, if you are an audiologist or hearing care professional and you don't specialize in tinnitus and a tinnitus patient comes to you and you're not comfortable working with them, please make that proper referral, because working with a tinnitus patient is very different from working with a patient who presents with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss with no presentation of tinnitus. So I will get off my soapbox there. Let's talk about, jeff, the leadership and collaboration at Stop the Ring. You have world-class leaders like Dr James Henry and Dr Donna Murray on your board. How important is collaboration across patients, clinicians and researchers to the success of this initiative?

Speaker 2:

Well, it's crucial, blaise. I mean every person in the organization has a voice. Every person has a unique story. My own story is unique, as is yours as a clinician, as is Dr Henry as a researcher, who also has contended us. By the way, and you know, dr Donna Murray comes from an approach where she led the Autism Learning Health Network for seven or eight years. As we know, autism is also a neurological disorder, so there's some carryover from you know the type of disease that she is used to treating and researching.

Speaker 2:

So John is an incredibly valuable member of the team because, while I can speak the learning health concepts very well, because I've been trained by people at Cincinnati Children's I worked for a learning health network IT company for a while John Bostic, who connected me to Cincinnati Children's, where I retired after my heart transplant. That's where I learned about the framework and John was actually building out an IT company and I was actually helping him do it to actually create the IT infrastructure for these learning health networks. So, and I actually got the help with the data modeling and all that. But yeah, the patients, the researchers, you know, the clinicians, they're all important components and the team that we put together so far is small, but we're growing and, of course, jim Henry needs no introduction. His reputation and experience in the field speaks for himself. So I reached out to Jim in 2021 when I first got serious after Kent Taylor's suicide and Jim wasn't quite ready because he was still working full time at NCRAR. Tutor to me has been a great mentor to me, as I've trained him on learning health networks. He's trained me about everything audiology and genesis related right. Jim retired and we're lucky to have him. He and Donna both joined in 2023. In 2024, we filed for a non-profit status and got that within a record 10 days, I think, and we've been on the move ever since.

Speaker 2:

We've added Dr David Olcom to the team. David has dual PhDs in organizational theory and a couple of other areas too. He's a data culture expert. Data culture is something that's part of every learning health network, so David's contributions have been huge. And more recently, dr Rebecca Lewis from the University of California, san Francisco.

Speaker 2:

Becky's been leading our pre-design sessions and we've been talking to Becky for the better part of this year, and I'm proud to say that Becky's joined the team too. We're very excited to have her on board all the experience and expertise that she brings. So we're growing and we've also entered another person too. Ironically, I met him doing astrophotography at 2 am one morning here in Cincinnati. I was packing up to leave and this fellow pulls up, starts setting up his gear. I shrank up a conversation with him. As it turns out he's a retired bioinformatics professor from Vanderbilt. And well, jeff Gordon is part of the team too, and he also has won national awards for his ability to do training and such. So we're building out the team. It's a process, but we're very excited and looking forward that this help moves the needle forward in any way that we can.

Speaker 1:

So Jeff talk about first class team and, knowing Dr Henry, who has been on the Hearing Matters podcast, I love and admire his passion for patient-centered care, his, of course, deep understanding and knowledge. I mean, he is a leader in tinnitus and we need to thank him for everything and all that he does and continues to do for this industry, because so many patients have been helped. As an extension of Dr Henry, Let me ask you you had said data culture. What does that mean and how is that going to help the patients who visit a Stop the Ring Learning Health Network?

Speaker 2:

First, I'd like to say too Bla to Blaze that over the next month or two, we're going to be rebranding away from Stop the Ring fully to Generous Learning Health Network, so we'll have a new website It'll be tlhnorg for listeners in a month or two from now and so data, as we talked about, is very important to all of us.

Speaker 2:

But when I was in the hospital for four months back in 2011, I said to myself you know, I'm with really competent people here, but you know the empathy that these nurses are showing me. I have to tell you that's right up there in equal terms to their competence, right? So at the end of the day, the patient comes first. We need to be empathetic, we need to show that there's hope for them. We need to ask for them to provide their data so that we can help not only them but future patients by aggregating that data, noticing patterns in the data. That again will help us better match up interventions with particular patients' subgroups. So the patient really is the center of all this. We want to get them involved with research and, again, we don't want them to feel that they are just the data points with respect to data culture, even though data is hugely important in the whole framework right.

Speaker 1:

That's, jeff. Again to your point and the why behind creating this learning health network. It's for the patients. They are at the center, so ensuring that they know, feel and believe and understand that they're not just another data point, that me providing this information is actually going to help me and my overall health as it relates to my tinnitus. That's really empowering it and has to be empowering for that patient Kind of leads me into breaking down silos, right? So tinnitus research and care can often feel fragmented. So how does Stop the Ring work to bridge those silos between research, clinical practice and patient experience?

Speaker 2:

First of all, we are not going to be the only organization doing research. There's many great organizations doing research the ATA, the Tinnitus Research Initiative in Europe. More recently, tinnitus Quest has come on shore. I liken them to the British rock invasion of the 1960s. That's a side note. At any rate, many organizations are doing research and Europe actually had ESIT for a while, the European. It was a specialized university they created for senators, phd candidates and so forth. They all had to do their own research.

Speaker 2:

So I think that what we'll see going forward and this will include us too is all these organizations, I think, will touch base more often and find more directed research that addresses more patient concerns. There's always going to be basic science that needs to be investigated. That's far, far away from the clinic. Right. You and I previously spoke that in some cases it may take up to 15 or more years to get research into the clinic for different disease conditions and we're seeing that shortened all the time. But the idea is we want to shorten that even further, get the patients involved too and really find a way to measure. How are we really empirically improving patients' lives? You know we have the patient-reported outcome measures. That's hugely important. And until we actually discover, and get it into the clinic, an objective way of measuring tinnitus, which we have not at this time in the clinic and won't for some time, we have to rely on what the patient tells us. So we need to empower the patient to tell us how they feel, how we're helping them, and go from there.

Speaker 1:

Jeff, for the average person living with tinnitus who may feel hopeless or, you know, like there are no good options, what impact do you personally hope you know Stop the Ring and TLHN will have in the next few years, Because this is a massive undertaking.

Speaker 2:

It is, and you know it's a work in progress place. It's going to be a lot of hard work involved. We're going to have to get funding for it, but what we want to do is create a ray of hope, if you will, where perhaps none has existed before. You know, patients get turned away by ENTs and audiologists telling them that there's nothing we can do to help you, whereas you know, as we build this network out and I'm hoping that we can get five to seven pilot sites in place sometime in 2026. And that would hopefully be a mix of several VA sites and maybe three or four academic research institutions like UCSF or maybe Vanderbilt, maybe Ohio State, others, of course, being considered that we could build a small network, build on successes there and then, several years out, we will definitely have identified which interventions work best for which subgroups of patients. So, from a clinician perspective and a patient education perspective, they can be better guided towards the right type of care, get them to the right type of care more quickly and make them feel better sooner, right no-transcript.

Speaker 1:

Who's funding this? And then, what does the overall scale look like with Stop the Ring and the Tinnitus Learning Health Network?

Speaker 2:

Well, I will say this, you know right now, today thank you for all the small donors who've donated to the cause and thank you to my board members who contributed and others, and also I've spent a lot of my own money at this, so far At any rate. So it's going to be a mix of what we discussed earlier, but, as a learning health network builds credibility, what we see with other learning health networks, too, is they may start charging a subscription fee right to various institutions, because, at the end of the day, we want insurance underwriters to also start covering the condition where they're not doing so today. Now, it's so much not a problem with the VA. Because of the veteran status, the VA paid out $6.2 billion last year. Think about that number for a moment $6.2 billion.

Speaker 2:

On the private sector side and you can certainly speak to this we really don't have any insurance coverage. So it is hoped that, as we start to show data that shows real, tangible, measurable results that actuaries like to look at, that the condition will eventually be underwritten so that we'll get better treatment compensation for providers and the patients alike, and so that we'll get better treatment compensation for providers and the patients alike. So, again, it'll be a mix of seed funding from wealthy individuals, from institutions, from industry folks, and then, as we go on, that revenue stream will still be applicable. But we often see subscription-based services too, depending on the dynamics of the economics involved.

Speaker 1:

I appreciate you answering that question and again, the entrepreneurial mind in me is like so how does that model work? I like the subscription model, of course, with working and collaborating with underwriters, with these insurances. Of course, creating that greater access and affordability to hearing health care. Of course, creating that greater access and affordability to hearing healthcare. We believe that Hearing Matters podcast and we have since 2019, when we actually, you know, started the Hearing Matters podcast hearing healthcare is best served in the hands of the hearing care professional. I believe that personally, clinically, professionally, I absolutely, wholeheartedly believe that. So I love the fact, jeff, that the Tinnitus Learning Health Network is implementing that same model. Visit your hearing healthcare professional, that professional who is trained on tinnitus retraining therapy and the like, who is trained on counseling patients who do present with tinnitus. So in the tinnitus learning health network, is it your goal to have a psychologist on staff who is specialized in CBT to then, you know, work on strategies to help with patients who present with tinnitus?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that's a good question and I think, as we get funded, I think a role like that would be really important, because CBT, as you know, is shown to be more effective than just about everything else, except perhaps maybe TRT is very close to it. I think, as we grow, that having someone who's CBT trained and maybe even someone who's TRT trained on staff could be part of the solution in terms of rolling out education for patients and also directing. How do we measure improvement? Are we going to just look at TFI scores, thi scores? Are there other measures that are going to be developed by the network? So, just to answer your question again, we will probably have someone on staff who has a CPT background, maybe someone on staff who has a TRC background too, because these are therapies that are known to work right. We want to maximize those. Now are we going to ask all the people on the network to use CBT or TRT? Heavens, no.

Speaker 2:

There's still an element of freedom involved and that brings up the tentative step care model that Dr Jim Henry has created really fits perfectly within the network and I anticipate we'll be using Jim's tinnitus step care model. I look at it as like open source and software. You can plug and play a lot of modules really, because you know how you're measuring each other right. As long as clinics, we can get them to agree on the right instruments to measure progress by, that's golden, because then we can get real agree on the right instruments to measure progress by, that's golden, because then we can get real world data from all these different instruments right Measuring instruments and combine that data and be able to find patterns. And again, think of a tinnitus learning health network as a near real-time clinical practice guideline. You know we have clinical practice guidelines that come out every 10 years, but we'll be collecting data constantly and we'll be sharing best practices, probably periodic intervals, probably monthly, I'm thinking. So think of a clinical practice guideline evolving monthly, based on real data.

Speaker 1:

I like that a lot, jeff, and what I'm excited for obviously this entire project. But when you're able to see patterns from the data and, especially, you know what percentage of our patients went through TRT CBT, what seemed to work better, you know why did it work better? Is it the counseling? So to be able to string these different hypotheses together is exciting, but the reason why it's so exciting is all the patients that you're helping make an educated decision regarding their hearing health care. So, jeff, your vision for the future fast forward. Five years from now, what does success look like for the Tinnitus Learning Health Network?

Speaker 2:

Great question. Well, first of all, I hope that I'm not leading the network five years from now. I hope it'll be in good hands of someone younger. That's one of my goals and I will still be around and helping and providing some insights, as I love to do. But in five years, I'd love to see the network be 30, 40, 50 sites in size. You know, maybe the 20, 25 academic research institutions, maybe 10 or 15 VA clinics, and then we'd also like, over time, to add in large private practices. What I mean by that is private practices that have more than one office. Maybe you know something like that has 10 practices under their belt, because I think that's we don't want to leave them out. We don't want to leave private practice out.

Speaker 2:

Now. We'll be sharing data all the time with everyone. We'll be writing papers, we'll be publishing papers with our findings, so we'll be sharing that worldwide. But we want to see, I'd say, 30 or 40 sites involved. I'd personally like to see artificial intelligence and machine learning be actively utilized, because we have sufficient data for them to work with, and not as an end-all be-all, because I just use my GPS as a guide, for example but to help guide clinicians and guide patients to better inform treatment paths more quickly, more efficiently, and I'd love to see again tinnitus being reimbursed by insurers. That was one of the things I spoke about in 2021 when I presented this concept at Rich Tyler's conference. We need insurers to step up, but they won't do it until we present real data. That's what we're going to do.

Speaker 1:

Jeff, before we close out for the day, what is that number one takeaway you want our community to walk away with?

Speaker 2:

First of all, for tinnitus patients. Please know that there is hope For tinnitus clinicians. We're going to be working with you closely to help make this network For researchers. We want you involved as much as possible. Again, this gets back to the golden triad of patients, researchers and clinicians. Again, this gets back to the golden triad of patients, researchers and clinicians. And, most of all, I just want people to take away that this is a novel approach. Coming in from a completely different vantage point Me coming from a data modeling, data analyst, data warehousing perspective I looked at the field and saw how disjointed it was, and this framework will help allow the field to become better organized and to mature, in my view, and at the end of the day, patients are going to reap the benefits.

Speaker 1:

Jeff, thank you for sharing your journey and you know the incredible work you're leading through Stop the Ring, to be rebranded as Tittitus Learning Health Network. My friend, your story is absolutely a powerful reminder of resilience, but really what's possible when patients, clinicians and researchers really do come together with a shared mission. For anyone listening who is living with tinnitus or knows someone who is, there is real hope in the vision Jeff and his team are building. You can learn more, get involved or even support the mission by visiting his team are building. You can learn more, get involved or even support the mission by visiting stoptheringorg. As always, thank you for tuning in to the Hearing Matters podcast. Until next time, take care of yourself and each other.

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Blaise M. Delfino, M.S. - HIS

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