Robust patient engagement has always been difficult to achieve for non-native speaking patient populations. Language barriers often serve not only as barriers to care plan communication and compliance, but also often serve to discourage foreign language speakers from seeking care in the first place.

Telephone-based interpretation services have helped many patients to communicate with their doctors, but communication nuances are often lost — expressions, body language and idiomatic phrases, for example — which can be recovered and accounted for in video-based interpretation encounters, when in-person interpreters aren’t available.

Some hospitals are now experimenting with tablet-based video interpretation services to improve population health management for non-native speaking communities, boost patient engagement rates and improve health outcomes.

Get the full story here, from HealthcareITNews‘ Bill Siwicki.