How Healthcare Language Services Save Lives

Is There an Alternative to Professional Medical Language Services?

When a patient enters your facility in need of urgent care, communicating with them or with their accompanying person is vital. You need to understand the context of the symptoms or injury. You need to understand if the patient has previous medical conditions. And you need to determine a course of action based on a lot of factors you may not be able to perceive instantly.

But, what if your patient and their relatives don’t speak the same language as yourself? What if their level of proficiency is so low that misunderstandings are likely?

Let’s say your patient is a Spanish speaker. You’ve got three options:

1. Using a machine translation app that “listens” and translates.
2. Relying on the first Spanish speaker you can find (a relative or another patient), to act
as an ad-hoc interpreter.
3. Looking for a Spanish interpreter.

Especially if you’re working in a multilingual area, being prepared for this type of situation is crucial. Providing professional linguistic assistance to your patients prevents dangerous mistakes while honoring their legal right to such assistance.

But, looking for the right language services provider can be overwhelming. There are too many options out there, and the differences between providers may be unclear. Not all services are created alike. For instance, the costs, benefits, and potential downsides of relying on in-person interpreters are different from those of remote interpreting. And not all remote interpreting is the same either.

On the other hand, it’s important for you to understand your practice’s specific language needs. And training yourself to better accommodate your LEP patients will make a world of difference.

In this free white paper, we’ll explain the cost of linguistic assistance, how your practice can benefit from it, and how you can prepare yourself to accommodate LEP patients.

We’ll take a look at the best strategies to conduct interviews with LEP patients. And we’ll also address some common concerns, such as how to handle foreign-language medical documents, and how to vet language services providers.