Equipping providers with the tools and resources needed to provide quality care to LEP patients is critical.
Imagine you're a doctor and a patient comes into the emergency room needing immediate medical attention. You've found yourself in similar situations countless times, but this is different – this patient doesn't speak English. What now? What steps need to happen to ensure this patient receives care?
Every patient deserves to receive the same level of quality care, no matter what language they speak. Designing systems to alleviate the burden on providers isn't easy, but it's worth it. Equipping your health system with high-quality language services and ensuring all staff are trained on the proper procedures will better enable providers to care for all patients – enhancing patient experience, improving outcomes, and raising your HCAHPS score for maximum reimbursement.
Here are 7 ways exceptional medical interpreting – grounded in technology, data, and qualified human talent – keeps your patients feeling happy and your HCAHPS scoring high:
1. Better Communication = Confident Patients
Several questions on the HCAHPS survey ask about listening and explanations. That’s why you need to make sure your hospital staff are utilizing medical interpreters who can efficiently translate and fully explain medical procedures, prescription instructions, and even admittance and discharge processes. If limited-English speaking patients don’t understand what providers are telling them, or feel they’re not being understood, they’ll translate that angst and frustration into those survey answers. But, if they feel confident and in the loop, those answers will reflect that patient satisfaction.
2. Fast Connections = Better Patient Flow
Waiting for care makes patients agitated and unhappy. That’s just common sense. So when your language services provider makes sure telephone interpreting connections are fast and reliable via smart, skills-based routing, you’re able to treat all patients (including English speakers) faster and more efficiently.
3. Qualified Interpreters = Accurate Communication
Dealing with inexperienced interpreters who don’t fully grasp the medical terminology or patient flow could lead to serious miscommunications, medical errors, and negative health outcomes. When interpreters are appropriately certified, trained, and experienced, language barriers dissolve and errors fade.
4. Critical Data Visibility = Smarter Decisions
Detailed insight into your language services is what takes you from a reactive defense to an informed offense. Your provider must be adamant about your data, and this data should provide obvious value for you:
- Usage data: Record of the services you’re using, by language, and what departments are using them
- Service-level data: Performance of these services (e.g., handle times and connect times) and how they’re working to improve your facility’s efficiency and patient experience
- Call data: Detailed information on time, location, patient identification, and department, creating transparency across the health system and more efficient billing
- Population data: Size and profile of your market, including a.) how you could better allocate resources and services according to the languages spoken in your community, and b.) where you could increase patient outreach initiatives for growth potential
With anytime access to all this language-specific data (plus the ability to create custom reports and visualizations, all from a single platform), you can spot internal communication glitches, gaps in language support, sources of negative patient experience, and opportunities for growth – and then act on them strategically, of course.
5. Strong Cultural Competency = Comfortable Patients
Patients from different cultures have different ways of thinking and expressing themselves. For example, a patient with ingrained attitudes toward gender roles, professional hierarchies, and pain transparency may stay quiet when they should really speak up. Or they could find a seemingly innocuous behavior offensive. Interpreters must be alert to and respectful of these cultural sensitivities to help make sure limited-English patients feel comfortable and appreciated – building trust and promoting patient satisfaction.
6. Unified Language Support = Smooth Operations
When communication tools are disjointed, processes choke up and errors emerge. Staff is frustrated and patients get fed up... or worse, misdiagnosed or mistreated. A unified language platform cuts through the chaos and gives your doctors, nurses, and administrators easy access to a consistent set of interpreting and translation tools. With communication unified across all departments and channels – and language services like telephone interpreting, video interpreting, on-site interpreting, and translation accessible from any device – you keep operations running smoothly.
7. Smart Technology = Strong Foundation For Positive Outcomes
If your language services provider doesn’t have the smart, reliable technology your facility needs to dissolve its communication barriers, they’re going to cut corners. And this is the kind of shaky foundation that leads to dangerous errors and negative outcomes. Technology should be your provider’s passion and strength – from the unified language platform that keeps all your communication consistent and centralized, to the right amount of dual-handset phones and video interpreting technology for ultimate clarity and quick access to medical interpreters.
We believe in providing better experiences (for everyone).
With over 20% (and growing) of Americans speaking a language other than English at home, strong and unified language support is more important than ever to keeping all patients satisfied. By equipping providers with the right tools and resources to serve their limited-English speaking patients, they'll be better prepared to extend the same quality of care to everyone – improving outcomes, increasing patient satisfaction scores, and raising your bottom line.
At GLOBO, we’re journeying toward a future where everyone has the same experience no matter what language they speak. With GLOBO, Telephone Interpreting, On-Demand Text Translation, Video Interpreting and more live in one place. Gain unprecedented visibility into usage and trends. Communicate in over 350 languages. Join the revolution and provide better experiences (for everyone).
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