More than 20% of patients in the ICU require an alternative way to communicate

Imagine you're in the hospital after being injured in a car wreck. You wake up with a ventilator helping you breathe but preventing you from speaking. You can't ask questions, request pain medication or let your providers know that something doesn't feel right. You're unable to write out your needs, so your nurse does her best to guess what you're trying to tell her. 

Miscommunication is common in the healthcare setting and can have deadly consequences. Anything from a ventilator to a traumatic injury could prevent a patient from speaking and effectively communicating with their care provider. This can be frustrating for both the patient and caregiver and can even hinder patient care. In fact, patients with communication barriers are three times more likely to struggle with Hospital Acquired Conditions (HACs), such as infection.

The tools currently available to address this issue are either too simple or too complicated. Traditional methods—such as pen and paper, dry erase boards, gesturing and lip reading—can be inefficient, impossible for the patient to use and can lead to uncertainty, frustration and poor treatment outcomes. Even if nurses learn to use dozens of highly specialized apps or assistive devices, they still may not be able to meet the wide variety of communication needs of our patients.

To meet this need, a team of passionate frontline caregivers at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center - Temple have developed a new platform, called Voice to the Voiceless. By integrating multiple communication modes into a single app—including touch and tap, head tracking, facial gesturing, eye-gaze tracking and more—Voice to the Voiceless eliminates communication barriers, allows patients to express themselves in a way that fits their accessibility needs and enables caregivers to provide more effective treatment.

Beyond the ICU

The Voice to the Voiceless platform has the potential to transform the healthcare experience for patients with a wide variety of communication barriers in virtually every area of direct patient care throughout the hospital. 

For example, language barriers and hearing impairments can also make it difficult to provide quality healthcare and can result in longer patient stays, increased financial burden and reduced patient satisfaction. With features like multiple language options and speech-to-text, Voice to the Voiceless enables patients to see real-time transcriptions in their native language of their care provider's spoken communication. 

We need your support

The current prototype for Voice to the Voiceless is pieced together using a website and a shortcuts app, accessible by a tablet on a custom-built adjustable cart. However, the workflow isn’t seamless yet and requires someone already familiar with the system—and with protocols of the ICU—to deploy it with a patient and troubleshoot if issues arise. This limits the team’s ability to collect data demonstrating the system’s effectiveness and hinders broad implementation throughout the hospital.

How your gifts can help:

  • Support the development of a Voice to the Voiceless app that will integrate with different devices, featuring a user-friendly interface that any provider can utilize in a patient care setting 
  • Fund hardware and equipment for broad implementation, including custom-built carts and tablets with eye-gaze technology
  • Support implementation staffing, project management and development of training materials

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