Healthcare and Language Access Series

When we think of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) we think of the internal turmoil and stress that war inflicts on our brave women and men in the military, but as we’ll learn from our conversation with Silvia Garcia Codony, CEO and co-founder of Mira Therapeutics, its effects are far more broad than that.The National Center for PTSD states that some 8 million adults have PTSD in any given year in America, with 8 out of every 100 people having it at some point in their lives.

How do we think about the mobile apps and data that we use in our day to day lives? How can data collected on a smartphone be used to ethically combat COVID-19? In today’s Healthcare and Language Access Series conversation we speak with futurehacker Dele Atanda, CEO and Founder of metaMe about the intersection between healthcare and tech!

To top off Ad Astra’s MedStar Race to Beat Cancer participation (it’s NOT too late to donate here!), I offer a story that highlights the amazing things that happen at the intersection of health, healthcare and community when you run life like a marathon.

In a continuation of last week’s (Part 1) interview with MedStar Washington Hospital Center’s Vanessa Niño, we delve deeper into how COVID-19 has affected interpreters as well as the broader language services industry. As a Communications Services Manager who is also an interpreter, Niño shares her perspective on language access following her experience with the COVID-19 crisis.

Interpreters are critical to the well-being and health of patients, providers, and families in healthcare settings. That’s because without interpreters, non-English-speaking patients may not get the care they need to handle issues that have sent them to the hospital or doctor’s office. And, now, in the midst of a pandemic, the importance of language access support has become even clearer.

In the second half of our exciting chat with Dr. Alexander Chiu of Air Visits we dig deeper in to how he was able to scale a system that allowed him to successfully see 100s of patients a day to service the top ten causes of death in the US, all in a virtual medium.

While the world continues to experience the COVID, technology has been playing a critical role in facilitating “normal life” activities as we are quarantined/”socially distanced” from one another to help curb the spread of the virus.  Due to these circumstances, more and more people have adopted technology and become more adept using technology platforms to help us socialize, work, learn, and obtain medical and other necessary services.

In part 2 of our lively chat with telehealth rapid implementation expert Sam Lippolis we gaze into the crystal ball that is telehealth during the pandemic. Find out what silver linings have developed out of this catastrophic event, learn more about the myth of telemedicine leaving people behind, how to properly acknowledge and serve LEP, Deaf, and vulnerable populations and how systems can integrate telehealth more holistically in to every day practice moving forward.

With everything going on with COVID-19 and the impact, or rather, the pause it on life as we know it, what is normal, anymore? For starters, medical translation and medical interpreting are still essential and required by law.Shifting to telework, caring for our children while we work remotely, juggling meals, chores, social distancing, etc. Part of this “new normal” turns its attention to how we will provide and receive medical care moving forward.