Doctors Are Resorting to Google Translate to Understand Their Patients
Hospitals don’t have enough interpreters for a growing number of patients with limited English
When Jorge Rodriguez was a medical student, he saw a patient on his surgical rotation who only spoke Mandarin. None of the doctors on the team spoke the language — all they knew was the word for pain. To check on the patient, they would push on her abdomen, ask “pain?” in Mandarin, and use her response to guide her care.
“We didn’t actually know if she understood what we were asking,” Rodriguez says.
Now a health technology equity researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Rodriguez studies the growing need for interpreters and translators in U.S. health care. Patients who speak limited English are at a higher risk of a bad medical outcome than English-speaking patients because they have more trouble communicating with a medical team. Interpreters are expensive, and as U.S. demographics shift toward fewer English speakers, hospitals sometimes see them as an impractical option. To address these needs, some health care professionals are starting to rely on tech.
“We didn’t actually know if she understood what we were asking.”
