Lawmakers in California, USA are seeking legislation that requires all government healthcare agencies to provide multilingual medical services to all people with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). The American state is the most linguistically diverse in the United States and its medical system reveals a growing problem throughout the world as facilities try to find solutions to provide quality medical care to patients who cannot effectively communicate with their doctors.
In diverse cities like San Francisco, the demand for ad hoc medical translators is high but the number of professional translators available is not sufficient. Most often, hospitals will use volunteer translators or even the patient’s family members to interpret. Though these people may be fluent in both languages, they are not specifically trained to translate medical terms. Not knowing specific terms in both languages can lead to translation mistakes, putting the patient in danger of being treated for the wrong ailment. In the 1980 case of Willie Ramirez, the mistranslation of a single term caused a tragic mistake, leading to legal action against the medical facility involved. Consequently, doctors have become hesitant to treat patients with LEP. As a defense, they take extra measures to diagnose patients by running more tests than necessary, relying on medical records and patient consent forms, or refusing to treat the patient altogether. LEP patients themselves are less likely to make doctor visits or use preventative tests for illness. The same patients may have difficulty understanding a diagnosis, medication instructions, and information on how to follow up with treatment. As a result of poor medical communication, doctors are left uncertain and patients, dissatisfied.
What multi-lingual medical care needs is consistency across all medical terminology in all languages. If hospitals do not have the option of using ad hoc translators, it is necessary that their staff have a way to refer to specialized terminology. A centralized, efficient and accessible database of multi-lingual medical terminology would be the ideal solution to alleviate the pressure for accuracy among hospital translators, and to help educate or break down language barriers between medical staff and their patients.
TermWiki Pro provides a way for accurate medical translation.
TermWiki Pro is an open terminology project that can be made accessible to all medical staff and patients. TermWiki Pro allows you to quickly and efficiently collect, translate and professionally approve medical terms in multiple languages, all within one centralized and cloud based platform. These terms can then be made available to both staff and patients in the form of either physical or digital medically approved content. Hospital translators can refer to these terms when working directly with medical staff and their patients or these terms may also be used to create medical literature in multiple languages. TermWiki Pro is available on mobile as well as desktop platforms, making it not only efficient and informative, but also highly accessible.
Ensure your medical content is made accurate in all languages. TermWiki Pro eliminates the possibility of miscommunication of medical terms, ensuring that your information is precise and accurate. TermWiki Pro allows you to manage your medical terms in over 100 different languages and have them reviewed and approved through a systematic and intuitive workflow based cloud platform.
Just because your medical institution has interpreters and translators doesn’t mean that they know specific medical terminology. Equip your interpreters and translators with TermWiki Pro to help them quickly find the correct translation of any medical term. Simply search for the term and receive the correct translation. Feel secure knowing that your medical professionals have communicated correctly and each patient is receiving excellent care.
Functional—TermWiki Pro is cloud based as well as desktop and mobile ready. Its robust member management module allows you to deploy translators with medical expertise from across the globe, and have full control over the process whether you’re at your desk or on the go. This ensures your medical content has been reviewed and approved by the best translators, whatever their location and that you’re in the loop with the whole translation process. It’s an ideal solution for managing the translation process with a distributed translator base while ensuring effective collaboration and quality.
Centrally Managed—TermWiki Pro keeps all of your terms in one place, and makes them accessible anywhere. Any changes to your terminologies or translations are immediately published for all, eliminating the risk of outdated information being used by some of your staff. Because it’s mobile-based, your staff has access to medically approved terminology on any device with internet access. Your medical staff can carry it with them on an iPad, laptop, or phone. Terminology has never been more accessible for times when a quick translation is needed for an important medical term.
Managing vast amounts of medical terminology can be a tedious and painful experience when using EXCEL and other terminology management platforms. TermWiki Pro ensures that the whole process of gathering your translation teams, entering your medical terms and having them translated and approved is made easy through its intuitive and user-friendly interface.
TermWiki Pro requires little training and is easy for your translation as well as medical staff to use. Search for medical terms with ease and arrange them in folders called “Blossaries” for easier access to specific medical content.