Effective communication is a core part of any encounter between a patient and the healthcare industry. Yet it’s often hard to achieve good communication, particularly when there’s a language barrier between patient and provider.
As technological solutions to resolve these language gaps become more and more sophisticated, there’s real potential to improve health outcomes thanks to better translation technology.
In a clinical setting, it’s not always easy to get the language support needed to ensure dialogue runs smoothly. That’s particularly true when patients seek urgent care and there’s no time to arrange for a human translator.
A shortage of translators working in the medical field doesn’t help the situation. There’s also the question of cost. Although the Affordable Care Act specified that clinics should provide translation services, often these are provided at prohibitive cost via a pay-per-minute phone line.
There are multiple studies showing how patients presenting with limited language abilities often receive compromised care. It’s possible to improve outcomes by offering trained professional interpreters and bilingual healthcare providers, but this isn’t always feasible.
Technology is starting to offer solutions that are increasingly accurate and, even more importantly, both practical and cost-effective to use in a clinical setting.
Mobile technology is at the core of this translation revolution in a medical setting. Paramedics have used their own initiative to download translation apps such as SpeechTrans Ultimate in order to better serve patients. But new translation technology isn’t just confined to smartphones.
Translation of written information
When you’re translating written medical information, such as prescription labels and medication documentation, accuracy is everything.
When translations are completed in a formal environment, the translation team will follow strict processes to ensure the quality and reliability of their work. But what happens when materials are translated in a less formal environment?
A study in an area of New York where Spanish is widely spoken as a primary language found that many pharmacies were providing translation services that were alarmingly flawed.
According to Reuters Health, new research indicates that the computer programs pharmacists rely on to translate prescription labels for non-English speaking customers often produce potentially harmful errors.
Although not all pharmacies provide translation services, those that do often use machine translation to give patients their prescriptions in a more familiar language. Around half of these translations were found to be seriously flawed. A third were incomplete, meaning information was missing.
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More worryingly, some pharmaceutical information was often mistranslated, and words on the English prescription were given a Spanish homonym. One such example is the case of a prescription that advised a drug be taken once a day.
Once in Spanish means eleven, a translation error that led to one patient taking far more medication than was intended. The problem with machine translation is that it requires a human translator to check results, yet is generally used when human translators aren’t available, such as in small pharmacies.
Can more intelligent machine-translation services improve translation outcomes and help avoid risks to patients? The rate of improvement in translation technology in just seven years since the New York study suggests that there’s every reason to believe technology already exists to improve these on-the-spot translation problems.
Of course, this presupposes that businesses such as pharmacies will have access to advanced translation technology.
For small businesses, it’s important that access remains affordable. While pharmacies in urban areas may see the value in providing translated materials to customers, those in rural areas where English is widely spoken may feel less need to invest in this kind of technology to cater to a minority of customers.
There are alternatives to giving pharmacies access to machine translation. One would be for standard terms and phrases in a variety of languages to be collected in an accessible language bank where pharmacists can pull together important information for customers, such as ‘take twice a day with meals.’
Despite the advance of machine translations, there’s still a need in some cases for translations to be approved by a human translator.
If machine translations are then approved by a human translator, they are likely to be more accurate as compared to machine-translated prescriptions that have not be checked by a human before given to the patient.
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Formal translation processes, with expert human medical translators and formal editing and review processes, are extremely important for the creation of reliable medical information. But informal and ad hoc translation is a key part of ensuring medication is used effectively.
Improved performance and the growing availability of translation solutions at the point of access to healthcare mean more patients can get the advice they need in a language they understand.
Language diversity
This is particularly important as language speakers become more dispersed around the world and language diversity increases at local levels.
It’s believed around 25% of New Yorkers speak Spanish at home, so it’s not unrealistic to be able to access healthcare there in Spanish, either because it makes sense for a translator to be on hand in busy practices or because the healthcare worker is a Spanish speaker themselves.
But New York is also home to hundreds more languages—800 in all, according to The New Yorker.
For many of the more obscure languages, it may be more realistic to use machine translation to support patients who need help in their native language. Being able to access vital health information in a familiar language is highly important to successful health transactions between patient and provider.
Trying to achieve this in a way that’s cost-effective is an important part of the solution. Perhaps the most important contribution machine translation can make to healthcare is in providing a cost-effective solution that helps ensure patient safety.