Hospitals and clinics in some areas see enormous numbers of people who don’t speak the local language well. While human interpreters have been common in exam rooms during patient care, it turns out that interpretation is beneficial throughout many areas of healthcare that previously haven’t had easy access to interpretation. That’s the problem Pocketalk addresses with technology that provides secure language translation throughout a healthcare organization.
Pocketalk is differentiated from consumer translation services by prioritizing security and providing technology that’s optimized for healthcare, which is both HIPAA and GDPR compliant. By default, Pocketalk has translation history turned off, preventing conversations from being stored and guaranteeing privacy. For hospital systems that require reporting for compliance, transcripts can be saved in the history settings. However, transcripts aren’t displayed on the home screen, which prevents visitors from reviewing what has been said to previous patients. Transcripts can also be deleted and the device can be set to automatically delete conversations after a specified amount of time.
Pocketalk offers an accurate and secure machine translation service in over 92 languages. Jeff Burrow, Pocketalk’s National Healthcare Director, says that in addition to medical discussions (for which it offers a large medical terminology directory), clinical sites use it for patient transport, wayfinding, parking lots, gift shops, food services, environmental services, and more. The device takes only about 10 minutes or less to learn and little to no formal training required, making deployment efficient and easy.
Pocketalk’s technology is offered as a dedicated device or as an enterprise-grade app that can be added to mobile devices an organization already has. The Pocketalk device has a microphone on both sides which facilitates capturing both the clinician’s and the patient’s sides of the conversations even in noisy environments. The device also has a camera and can translate documents or handwritten notes that are photographed. This is useful for vaccination forms, discharge papers, and follow-up instructions.
In a recent video interview, Matt Fidler, Director of Patient Experience at Augusta Health (which has several locations in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia) shared that many patients need interpretation starting right when they walk in the door. For example, how will they get to the right floor and room? This can be difficult for someone who speaks the local language, but is even harder for someone who speaks another language. Having translation tools available for volunteers and front desk staff can help them in this situation.
Augusta Health originally purchased 5 Pocketalk devices and recorded 11,000 translations in the first three 3 months. After seeing those numbers, they realized the urgent need for translation and now have 43 devices. Burrow says that organizations that have deployed Pocketalk learned how many important conversations weren’t taking place before.
Fidler and Burrow also talk about the importance of going beyond medical discussions to enhance the patient experience which makes the patient feel comfortable. For legal reasons, human interpreters are still needed in certain parts of clinical sessions, but Pocketalk is widely useful for other non-clinical conversations. Security is needed even for these conversations, because personal medical information often comes up.
In the emergency department, Burrow says, Pocketalk can save three or four minutes, which can be crucial in that setting.
Burrow also discusses their management tool called Ventana, which can manage all the Pocketalk devices in one place and enforce security practices such as turning off the camera or exporting transcripts.
Watch our video interview for more discussion of Pocketalk’s uses and value along with seeing a short demo of the product.
Learn more about Pocketalk: https://pocketalk.com/
Learn more about Augusta Health: https://www.augustahealth.com/
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