Language gap closes for hospital patients

An Ai Group member is changing the way multicultural communities receive emergency medical care.

In a first for Australia, leading language technology and language service provider 2M Language Services is providing on-demand interpreting for hospital patients to ensure culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) people don’t miss out on time-critical information.

Its video and audio interpreting platform, 2M lingo™, is powering language support for the Commonwealth Government’s healthdirect Video Call telehealth platform.

The service enables health providers to access 2M interpreters via healthdirect Video Call during a consultation.

“This is a first in Australia,” 2M CEO Tea Dietterich, pictured, said.

“With Northern Health’s Virtual Emergency Department (Virtual ED) expanding into the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department (VVED), more and more hospitals will be able to provide language access to their patients thanks to 2M lingo™.

“At the click of a button, clinicians and health providers can access a certified medical interpreter in migrant as well as selected First Nations languages and Auslan  — on demand and unscheduled, virtually."

Healthdirect Video Call is used by hospitals and health services in Victoria and Western Australia and health professionals across the country who work in aged care, allied health, Indigenous health, maternity health and mental health services. The calls go directly to a trained group of medical interpreters.

“In the past, if you needed an interpreter for a medical emergency, you had to book one and often pay an urgency loading,” Ms Dietterich said.

“So, patients often went without an interpreter as it was too hard or too costly. That's where technology comes in; our R&D department designed the platform with the health professional in mind: to make it easy to call an interpreter and to avoid urgency loadings.

“It is also very important that it is not just a phone call because visual cues from body language are essential for interpreters to convey meaning.”

Ultimately, it’s an interpreter’s effective management of the interaction that leads to improved communication outcomes.

The benefits of engaging interpreters speak for themselves: improving quality of care, achieving higher clinical outcomes, reducing hospital stays and lower rates of hospital readmissions.

“Patients having immediate, time-critical language access is instrumental,” Ms Dietterich said.

A master of six languages and President of the Australasian Association of Language Companies, Ms Dietterich is passionate about the advantages of AI in an industry where it has been traditionally shunned.

“We at 2M leverage people, technology and innovation and are at the forefront of language technologies in Australia,” she says.

“Being a leader comes with great responsibility, so we also train and upskill the workforce to have the required subject-matter expertise and tech competence.

“It’s why we launched our own training facility, the 2M Academy, two years ago — to train the linguists.

"Technology is moving rapidly on all fronts. Skillsets are changing. Knowing how to use interpreting and translation technologies has become essential in the industry.

"This is why we focus on subject-matter expertise and technology training, to ensure linguists who work with us are ahead of the curve in their profession.”

While neural machine translation engines can translate semantic structures and are usually trained for industry-specific terminology, linguists are very much needed for cultural relevance and subject-matter expertise.

“It’s about making translations relevant; it has to be relevant to the community and relevant to context and culture," Ms Dietterich said.

2M was instrumental in providing time-critical language access to multicultural communities during the worst of Covid.

“There was a lot of confusion during the height of the pandemic and a lack of understanding about vaccinations,” Ms Dietterich said.

“We helped Healthdirect Australia create a guide for CALD people who needed extra language support to make informed decisions with full understanding of the official information and advice.”

Meanwhile, Emergency Management Victoria selected 2M’s AI translation solution to enable instant in-language notifications of critical weather and disaster alerts for its 2.5 million VicEmergency app users.

It hopes to add another 1.5 million subscribers, to not only manage emergencies but to prevent disasters in the first place.

“As soon as those emergency updates or health updates come through, we are able to translate them into multiple languages to ensure the information gets out to Australia's multicultural community and that nobody is left behind,” Ms Dietterich said.

“Presently, a lot of CALD audiences miss out on disaster alerts and emergency communication, so we really hope to create change in this area.

“There needs to be greater awareness of the need for time-critical language access and information in different languages because we are such a multicultural society."

2M is also a successful Australian exporter. With offices in Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Santiago, Argentina, Paris and Manila, 2M looks after its international clients in export markets across Europe, LATAM and the US.

“The impact of language services is significant," Ms Dietterich says.

"We help organisations to engage and empower their stakeholders and give them a voice.

That’s why translation and interpreting doesn't only interest language geeks like us, it has now become a board-level topic.”

2M has been a member of Ai Group since 2022.

“Ai Group offers invaluable support for growing businesses like us that are scaling their operations and require support in HR, legal and governance as well as PD training courses. Connecting its members with professional networks, insights, and advice, Ai Group provides important resources to innovative companies navigating rapidly changing industries.” — Tea Dietterich, CEO, 2M Language Services

 

 ENDS