The time and resources devoted to finding the right translation vendor can intimidate many organizations into choosing a vendor purely based off of low-costs. However, when it comes to the health industry, the many areas of practice make determining terminology and tone a much more difficult process. Finding certified linguists trained in medical translation can make the difference between life and death. Choosing a poor medical translation vendor, can lead to major consequences in communication and place unnecessary risks on patients.

Choosing the right medical translation vendor requires finding linguists with a complete understanding of the industry. Take this excerpt from the Merck student manual about how to perform a cardiac procedure for example: “Right heart pressure measurements may help in the diagnosis of cardiomyopathy, constrictive pericarditis, and cardiac tamponade when noninvasive testing is nondiagnostic, and it is an essential part of the assessment for cardiac transplantation or mechanical cardiac support.” This excerpt is difficult enough to comprehend in English, and can only be truly understood by those with a knowledge of the terminology. Selecting linguists with a lack of medical industry experience or only a general understanding of medical terms can greatly increase risk of miscommunication, increasing the risk of harm to patients.

Miscommunication can lead to great costs for patients and healthcare providers. When selecting a medical translation vendor, understanding where and how linguists are selected can save your organization valuable time and money down the road while also helping to avoid risks. High quality translation vendors, such as inwhatlanguage, allow organizations to connect with linguists across the globe that specialize in multiple areas of medicine and other industries.

​Many healthcare organizations choose not to have interpreters or go through the process of selecting a high-quality vendor simply because they may not recognize the demand. A recent survey found that only 5% of physicians view language barriers as a major problem in communication. However, 48.6% of communication problems were associated with language or culture.

In addition to costs, comes the risk of physician malpractice. When it comes to communication for treatments such as prescriptions or procedures, selecting the right words can have drastic results on the rest of a patient’s life. Certified linguists understand this and can easily provide reliable translations for the necessary language.

With the right medical translation vendor, multilingual communication and documentation is simple. Not only can healthcare providers avoid risk, but can also improve overall patient health. Research has shown that patients that have a complete understanding of their medical condition and required treatments are more likely to comply with suggested medical procedure, leading to greater care and health.

Although selecting the right medical vendor can at first appear to require valuable resources, the lasting and benefiting impacts of high-quality accurate translations greatly outweigh the risk of choosing the first vendors on the list or lowest-cost vendors.

inwhatlanguage is a technology translation company that pairs human-based expert translation with powerful translation management system (TMS) technology. Using our cloud-based TMS, clients can simultaneously create, manage, and control all of their multilingual assets on one platform. At inwhatlanguage, we pride ourselves in connecting you with the right linguists and technology to ensure fast, simple, and high-quality translations every time.

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