Cool New Innovation in Language Translation Comes to Howard County

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

(HoCo Well & Wise) --

Community leaders and representatives of the county’s Spanish-speaking, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Deaf communities joined the Horizon Foundation and Howard County General Hospital last week to launch a new video interpretation service designed to make health care more accessible in increasingly-diverse Howard County.

Through a two-year grant from the Horizon Foundation, the Howard County General Hospital, Chase Brexton Health Services, and the Healthy Howard Health Plan will pilot the new service to determine how significantly this technology can improve health care access. Interpreter services will be delivered via a dedicated high-speed broadband network and a remote video interpretation platform known as “Martti,” an acronym for My Accessible Real Time Trusted Interpreter. Howard County General Hospital will deploy eight Martti units, and Chase Brexton and Healthy Howard will each use one.

In remarks last week, Vic Broccolino, CEO of Howard County General Hospital: Johns Hopkins Medicine explained that the hospital serves an increasingly diverse patient population with a growing number of non-English speakers and that Martti would serve to augment the existing, but limited onsite interpretation services. Of the county’s 280,000 residents, almost 15 percent are foreign born, according to 2010 census figures.

Richard Krieg, CEO of the Horizon Foundation said, “We expect that the new system will significantly enhance access to care for many of these residents.” Krieg noted that in meetings with school officials, the Foundation learned that it is not unusual for the children of non English speaking parents to be interpreters for their parents and local health providers. “This is undesirable for a number of reasons,” Krieg explained. “First, the child can miss an entire school day, and, secondly, it puts the student in a very uncomfortable position, especially if a significant illness is involved.”

Interpretation services will be delivered via wireless tablet PCs with two-way audio and video. Patients can access a real-time, live interpreter in approximately 20 languages, including several Chinese dialects, Korean, Burmese, Arabic, Vietnamese and American Sign Languages. More than 200 additional languages are available via audio.

Broccolino said, “On the first day we went live with the system, we had a woman in the Maternal Child Unit who spoke a particular dialect of Farsi,” Broccolino recalled. “Within five minutes we were able to connect with an interpreter who could communicate in that very dialect to give the patient discharge instructions. The level of timeliness would have been extremely difficult to achieve before Martti.”

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