Translation from Afar

A Croatian man stumbles through the front door of a rural Midwestern hospital, gasping for breath and cradling his stomach. The receptionist can’t understand what he’s saying, so she calls for a nurse—but even the nurse is mystified. She notices blood on the man’s shirt, however, and rushes him to the emergency room. Doctors wheel in a flat-screen monitor, on which a language interpreter appears. Using two-way video conferencing, the translator tells doctors what the injured man is saying, and he is treated.

Richard Fitzpatrick envisions such hypothetical communication gaps occurring in hospitals across the country. Physicians traditionally have had few options at their disposal in communicating with non-English-speaking patients—but Fitzpatrick hopes his fledgling company changes that. The Language Access Network offers medical personnel a 24-hour wireless communication center with interpreters who speak 180 different languages, and it’s available seven days a week.

“Video translators for a hospital’s primary three languages are always readily available. But any other language beyond those three takes a matter of 15 to 20 seconds to connect to an audio interpreter,” says

Fitzpatrick, T-LAN’s CEO. The centralized call center is in Columbus, Ohio, where the system began as an ER tool at Ohio State University Medical Center soon after its conception in May 2004. The call center links to a wireless-powered mobile cart with two-way video conferencing equipment, which connects medical personnel to an interpreter. The network has since expanded beyond the ER to various wings throughout the hospital, and Fitzpatrick says he is fielding inquiries from providers in other parts of the country.

The immediacy of the T-LAN system can save both time and money, Fitzpatrick says, because in-person translators spend much of their time commuting and sit idly once they arrive before assisting a client. “People who come in for chemo really need an interpreter, but their treatment can take hours. There’s no need to make a hospital pay for an interpreter the entire time,” he says. Hospitals pay only for the interpreter time they actually use at $1.95 per minute, plus a monthly service charge between $825 and $1,925 for a full unit of equipment, which includes a 17-inch flat video screen and camera.

Interpreters can help pre-op personnel, as well, given the number of forms that must be explained before a patient signs them, Fitzpatrick says. “I actually don’t know of any hospital in America that has an interpreter available for this sort of instance, and that’s a huge liability.”

—Matt Rogers