Starting a SRAVI trial – made as easy as possible

Liopa’s lipreading app, SRAVI, has been gaining attention with recent media coverage about how the app can help people in hospital.

As a result, we have been approached by many healthcare providers – and managers – to see if they can start a trial in their hospitals. People have been reaching out to us across many countries and continents.

There are several steps to go through with these possible new trial sites, for our ‘Onboarding process’. This article will spell out some of those steps to make it clear for potential new trialists what they can expect, and the questions that we will be asking.

Question one – What role are you in?

We need to determine if the clinician who wants to start a trial is in the right role and what type of patients they deal with.

Roles that can work for leading a SRAVI trial

• ICU Consultant
• ICU Nurse
• SLT – Speech and Language Therapist
• Laryngectomy Consultants – they may work on different recovery wards other than the ICU
• Occasionally, a junior doctor or medical student may get involved with setting up the trial

Question two – What patients do you look after?

SRAVI is helpful for patients who are very unwell, for example in ICU or high-dependency units, who have lost the use of their voice but can still mouth words.

Patient types that may benefit from SRAVI

• Voice-impaired patients
• Patients who have a tracheostomy
• Total laryngectomy patients

Question three – Where are you?

Next, we find out where they are located, geographically. This is important because – at the moment – SRAVI only lip reads in the English language.

Where can they be located?

• Located in any English-speaking geography
• To-date, our trials have been in UK and US hospitals, but there are some possible upcoming sites in Australia

After this point, we determine what type of hospital the clinician works for.

Question four – What sort of facility do you work for?

Healthcare groups or single hospitals may both work

• For example, Belfast NHS Trust is trialling SRAVI within a group of six hospitals
• Sometimes the clinician we set up the trial with, has a role in more than one hospital, and it can be brought to both facilities

We then make it clear to the trial leaders what steps they should expect before we get the app in front of patients.

Question five – Does our engagement model work for you?

The steps in our engagement model

1. Staff download the app onto their devices and try it out
2. Service evaluation begins with patients, but first there is information governance, ethics, consent, data privacy and protection to look after. Our Service Evaluation Agreements cover these legal areas
3. Staff can begin using the app with as many patients as they like
4. It may be helpful to post the SRAVI phrase list near patient beds

Question six – How many patients might participate in the trial?

The answer to this question will vary, depending on the facility. It’s site dependent – and impacted by how many beds a facility has. For example, it could be a small ICU with 1-2 patients a week, or it could be a 28 bed ICU – we can work with big or small facilities.

Question seven – Does our service and support model work for you?

Once the trial is up and running, the hospitals and clinicians can expect a very hands-on type of service from SRAVI – because we are a small team, any problems will go straight to a developer, and the communication will be direct with our R&D team.

Support offered by Liopa team through the trial

1. Business hours support through email and WhatsApp (GMT time zone)
2. We monitor the traffic through the app on a regular basis, particularly focusing on transactions that haven’t worked
3. For non-successful attempts to use the SRAVI app, we analyse these records, and provide individual user feedback. Many times there might be small user errors that we can improve or correct with guidance
4. We seek out and want feedback from the staff and patients. Our aim is to make changes based on their comments. We want to continually improve the app

For further information, or to request a call-back about setting up a trial, get in touch here.