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Removing language barriers is key to better healthcare

What if you went to the doctor and understood about half of what he or she said? Would you be confident about your diagnosis and treatment? Completely clear about what medications to take and what new symptoms to watch out for?

Maybe. But maybe isn’t good enough when it comes to health. All patients deserve the best possible care, but quality isn’t simply a matter of the right diagnosis and prescription. Patients do better when they understand their condition, how and why they are being treated, and what they should do if they do not improve.

All that requires clear communication and understanding during the patient encounter. Too often, even in our age of advanced technologies, that doesn’t happen.

Medical terminology can be puzzling in any language

The title of a 2007 report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine succinctly summarizes the role of language in healthcare: Improving Quality of US Health Care Hinges on Improving Language Services.

That report cited a 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine that found disparities in the nation’s healthcare system were often correlated with racial and ethnic differences and accompanied by language barriers.

“Physicians, nurses, technicians, and other health care professionals typically use unfamiliar medical terminology that may sound foreign regardless of primary language,” the 2007 report noted. “For patients who speak and understand little or no English, these challenges increase exponentially. When patients and doctors cannot talk with each other about symptoms, diagnoses, test results, medications, treatment plans, and follow-up care, the result is bad medical care.”

Meeting the challenge of linguistic diversity

Medicine is complex stuff to being with. Now imagine your practice is located in a region such as South Florida, where nearly 4 million people are native Spanish speakers — but whose origins in Central and South America mean they speak a wide variety of dialects of Spanish, with differing accents.

Now add 400,000 speakers of Haitian Creole, nearly 100,000 residents who speak Brazilian Portuguese, and tens of thousands whose first language is Mandarin Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, German, or French.

With an ambient listening solution such as Sunoh.ai, practices can capture all clinical details of every patient-provider encounter, whether the participants are speaking in English or any of nearly a dozen other languages.

Juggling languages at MedFlorida Medical Centers

MedFlorida Medical Centers, located in South Florida, is living proof of the value and efficacy of Sunoh.ai.

“As always we were looking for anything to combat provider burnout, save time, and improve efficiency, and Sunoh has this seamless integration with eClinicalWorks,” said Robert F. DeLuca, EMR Innovation Administrator for MedFlorida. “Providers were able — with a very, very shallow learning curve — to pick up the ambient listening through Sunoh and excel rapidly.”

The major feature of Sunoh.ai is that providers don’t need to type at all during the patient visit. Sunoh captures the conversation, creating a summary and draft clinical note that the provider can review following the visit. That can save hours of documentation daily. As DeLuca notes, the result is totally seamless, face-to-face, and eye-to-eye.

But it’s also multilingual.

“That seamless integration between the English, Spanish, and Portuguese has really benefited us,” DeLuca added. “We are having entire encounters that fluctuate between English and Spanish, Spanglish, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and then at the end the summary is crystal clear, and the suggestions are spot on.”

Sunoh’s speed advantage for documentation

Even with Sunoh’s proven record of success and more than 80,000 providers using the product to save two or more hours of time each day, some may still wonder whether an ambient listening technology is a better approach than using human scribes or relying upon some other method for overcoming language barriers.

While it is true that human scribes can do an excellent job transcribing patient-provider interactions, they are subject to the limitations that come with being human: They can get tired, they can make mistakes, and they must be paid.

Sunoh.ai, by contrast, offers a predictable per-provider, per-month pricing model, never gets tired, never takes a sick day, and never has to put in for vacation. And Sunoh’s accuracy meets or exceeds that of the best human scribes — while completing documentation much more quickly than a human can.

Sunoh breaks down language barriers others cannot

As for overcoming language barriers, Sunoh provides practices and their patients with the same advantages they have with documentation — speed, accuracy, and low cost — along with ever-improving technology that can recognize and accurately record medical information in nearly a dozen languages.

“Far too often,” that 2007 report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine notes, “health care providers rely on a patient’s family member, friend, or even a member of the hospital’s non-medical staff to communicate about clinical care — yet these individuals seldom have training in translating or interpreting medical terminology.”

Sunoh can accurately capture medical terminology and clinical details, providing draft clinical notes that can be integrated with any Electronic Health Record (EHR).

How Sunoh.ai is helping MedFlorida

Seamless Multilingual Support: Accurate documentation in English, Spanish, and Portuguese has enabled better communication with a very diverse patient population.
Time-Saving Efficiency: eClinicalWorks® integration with Sunoh.ai has had a significant impact on time-saving and accuracy in documentation.
Reduced Provider Burnout: Streamlined workflows has allowed providers to focus more on patient care, reducing stress and fatigue.

To learn more about how Sunoh.ai can help your practice save hours each day on clinical documentation, book a demo today.