Spanish to English translation?

Health Informatics: Is there an outstanding need for a usable live Spanish-English translation tool for doctors?

• I am imagining a tool where a Spanish-speaking patient speaks, the translator shows the translation in English text for the doctor, the English-speaking doctor speaks, and the translator shows the translation in Spanish text for the patient.

• Answer:

  I think it depends on your intended usage. In a setting where the patient needs to be understood, sometimes these types of tools are currently used to help doctors and help them communicate. However, generally patient instructions are manually translated and vetted because making sure that patient instructions are properly translated is important. It's important for patient safety and the physician also wants to make sure they are not liable for giving the patient the wrong instructions. If you're curious how possible it is to mistranslate something by computer, one only needs to google "Translation Fails". Many clinics/hospitals will pre-translate common patient instructions into other languages to ensure that they do not need to constantly translate common instructions. So, unless you have the technology to build something human accurate for translation that's better than Google translation or a better way for someone to manually translate documents, probably not. This is only from my experience when people have asked about automatic translation from the EHR/Patient portal solution days. Most hospital compliance officers were against the idea of even considering it.