Why medical interpretation services are important for healthcare and artificial intelligence?
For several years now, artificial intelligence has been used to complement and improve various spheres of life. It is increasingly being incorporated to assist medicine in different aspects, including diagnosis and healthcare. However, human intervention is still needed for quality output in domains where there is considerable room for nuance. Overcoming language barriers is one such domain, and interpretation is a discipline that remains decidedly on the human side of the equation. However, it has the potential to become a linchpin that eases the integration between healthcare and AI.
In this article we will explore some aspects of the relationship between medicine, artificial intelligence and interpreting services, in an attempt to shed some light on how the interrelation between these three domains can grow harmoniously.
According to research by McKinsey & Company, artificial intelligence is transforming Healthcare in fields such as Chronic Care Management, Care Delivery, Clinical Decision Support, Diagnostics, Triage and Diagnosis and Self-Care. Let’s look at some aspects of the synergy between healthcare and artificial intelligence.
McKinsey’s report acknowledges that artificial intelligence is expected to heighten the veer of healthcare towards a home care model, especially with the introduction of remote monitoring technology.
Clinics and hospitals want to provide the best medical attention to their patients, and to do so in a multilingual country, have to address the issue of language differences, which requires both technologies and integrated services like medical interpretation. This saves time, money and often lives, and increases the overall patient care that an institution provides.
There is a growing tendency to see examples of “Artificial Intelligence in clinical practice based on evidence from clinical trials, with increasing focus on improved and scaled clinical decision-support”, reports McKinsey & Co. However, the accelerated adoption of cultures, customs and mindsets is still in the process and has a long way to go. The support of medical interpreting services is essential when making sense of evidence from clinical trials.
According to this study, “algorithms overtook human performance on General Language Understanding Evaluation, a metric for measuring language understanding. Similar improvements are being made in reading, sound and video comprehension, translation and the ability to answer questions with an algorithm trained on text innovation”. Until those improvements become reliable and widely available, multilingual interpretation services are the best way to address the management of nuance.
In the United States, the healthcare sector has been working on a gradual incorporation of artificial intelligence for some time. Vasant Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis since 2018, announced that “we are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build a critical ‘big data’ genetics and health records resource of over 500,000 people that could empower new artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, and we are leading a life sciences consortium that will make much of this publicly available. We are also investing $100 million in the Regeneron Science Talent Search”.
Narasimhan’s work is unprecedented. With the spread of COVID-19 and the need to optimize the use of technology in Healthcare, integrating “artificial intelligence, telemedicine, automation and even quantum computing into the labor-intensive process of inventing new medicines” is a must.
Healthcare is a heavyweight industry in the United States. And the ever-growing need for accuracy points towards the need to accompany that technological evolution with reliable medical interpretation services. In medical institutions across the country, the adaptation of health services to suit US residents who speak languages other than English is becoming more of a must than a nice-to-have.
Advances in the medical and pharmaceutical industries, along with a boom in medical research and medical literature creates a high-stakes context. It is critical to avoid mistakes of any kind, and language accuracy becomes a cornerstone. The phrase “lost in translation” embodies all that the healthcare industry cannot afford.
Medical researchers and developers need reliable language translation services to secure the steady flow and progress of a 10 trillion-dollar industry. In that vein, research institutions need to work with qualified interpretation services providers because a single mistranslated term can be a cause for disaster.
Access to good health care is a human right that should be guaranteed at any cost. And when it comes to providing good health services in a country with multiple language demographics, language interpretation services have extreme significance.
The Healthcare Industry plays a central role in the lives of Americans, and specialized language interpretation services with qualified and certified medical interpreters is no longer an option in a country whose citizens speak more languages than English. From medical research to advanced medical literature, and even day-to-day patient records and documentation, the need for highly reliable medical interpretation is easy to see. And when it comes to direct medical intervention, whatever costs are involved pale in comparison to the cost of misunderstanding.
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