Tech Salon

The provision of quality, accessible, affordable healthcare interpretation in the hospital setting represents a tremendous challenge to U.S. healthcare providers.  The importance of clear communication between patients and providers has long been considered critical to successful medical outcomes.  For the limited English proficient population and the deaf and hard of hearing populations, encounters with the medical profession have often been filled with the fear and anxiety that they will not be able to understand and be understood in these hospital environments.  Hospital services require 24 x 7 x 365 coverage, there is often a need for very a very large volume of interpretation, and up to 20 languages need to be available.  Fulfilling these requirements represents a tremendous challenge to hospital management teams.  New technologies now allow the design of systems of sharing video interpreter services among multiple hospitals through an automated routing system.  These technology advances allow the creation of cooperatives taking full advantage of the economies of scale of shared interpreter services. 

This workshop will examine the experience of the Health Care Interpreter Network (HCIN) a cooperative of California hospitals sharing a video/voice call center service.   The HCIN currently serves San Joaquin County Health Services, Contra Costa Health Services, San Mateo Medical Center, Riverside County Regional Medical Center, Kern Medical Center, and in Los Angeles County, LA County-USC Medical Center, Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and Olive View – UCLA Medical Center.  The experience of the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council which is organizing a cooperative of Chicago area hospitals to accomplish these objectives will also be examined. 

The value of these advanced technologies is the ability deliver a very close approximation to in-person interpretation -  the “best practice” of health care interpretation - with high quality visual and audio connections, at a significantly lower cost.   The interpreter system utilizing a video/voice call center and sharing interpreters among multiple hospitals offers tremendous increases in productivity and a reduction in administrative overhead. 

The challenges in creating this kind of system have been in both the technical and quality fields.  Technologies for this business model of video call centers requires that videoconferencing operate through different enterprise security protocols, hundreds of times per hour, without specific engineering support.  These technologies are in the bleeding edge stage and there are no operating models to draw experience from.  On the business side of the picture, different hospital systems must find measures to evaluate and assure quality healthcare interpreting, if they are to successfully exchange services between them.

Participants in this workshop will learn about the successes and the challenges of the various hospital systems testing these new technologies.  With the information they gain from the workshop, participants will be able to assess the value of this kind of system for their healthcare interpretation needs.