Neighborhood Health gets fed funding for translation equipment
A hand-held translation device being used by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf will soon be available on local rescue vehicles and in health care facilities, enabling medical personnel to communicate with patients in dozens of different languages.
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The “Phraselators,” as the gadgets are called, were developed by Middletown-based Marine Acoustics Inc., a high-tech military contractor, to help cope with the shortage of interpreters available to American soldiers in the war against the Taliban.
U.S. Sen. Jack Reed visited the manufacturing plant when the first 1,000 units were shipped out, in early 2002, and the Phraselator “appealed to me immediately as one of those technological devices that were so practical,” he said.
So when, last year, Reed heard about Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island’s “Su Salud” program, a major effort to expand and improve the translation services available in the state’s health care facilities, the senator had a brainstorm.
“I said, ‘We’ve got this tremendous company in Rhode Island with this great device that I could see being used by health care providers to get at least quick information from patients,’” Reed recalled. Christopher F. Koller, then Neighborhood’s CEO, liked the idea.
Phraselators are expensive – the list price is $2,300. But with Reed’s help, Neighborhood has now obtained a $250,000 grant from the federal Health Resources and Service Administration to buy the units as well as some other translation-related technology.
Bernard L. Patterson, Marine Acoustics chief financial officer, said Phraselators have been used in “a number of small pilot projects” in civilian settings, but not on a large scale. So by making the devices available to hospitals, fire departments and other health care providers in Rhode Island, Neighborhood is blazing a new trail, Reed said.
“I think it’s going to be a terrific improvement in health care,” he said. “I think we’ll be pioneering something that could be used all over the world.”
Neighborhood, the state’s largest Medicaid health plan, is already at the forefront of language-related advances in health care, driven to a great extent by the large share of its members – one-quarter – who speak Spanish. With Neighborhood’s support, the state made medical interpretation services reimbursable under RIte Care; the company pays for 500 to 600 such items each month, spokesman Tom Boucher said.
Then in 2002, Neighborhood launched “Su Salud” with five partners, Providence Community Health Centers, Rhode Island Hospital/Hasbro Children’s Hospital, Women & Infants’ Hospital, St. Joseph Hospital and the Ocean State Action Fund. The program was supported by a $150,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, one of only 10 given nationwide to help improve communication between Latinos and health care providers.
“Su Salud” (Spanish for “Your Health”) has worked to standardize the training for medical interpreters, paid for 60 people to be trained, and provided a new reimbursement source for providers who invest in making these services available.
The new $250,000 grant, said Ernest A. Balasco, interim CEO of Neighborhood, will allow the program to “make significant leaps forward,” providing money for teleconferencing equipment, software for a call center, and, most important, the Phraselators.
The devices, as Reed and Patterson described them, are small, portable and easy to use, responsive to voice commands or to selections made with a stylus. You can program them to “speak” more than 40 different languages, Patterson said; 1,000 phrases fit into one megabyte of space, and the memory cards will be 60 MB.
A rescue worker, for example, can point his stylus on the screen and make the device say, “Point to where it hurts” or “Do not touch this tube” in Spanish, French or Hmong. It’s a one-way device – it can’t take a Hmong answer and translate it to English – so all the phrases are written to be simple and, if they involve questions, to elicit answers that can be given in gestures, or with “yes” or “no.”
The original Phraselators, which have since been improved on twice, were geared to the needs of U.S. troops, Patterson said. Now, as the civilian world takes interest, new modules are being developed to suit civilian needs. Rhode Island rescue workers and health care providers will be among the first to try them, he said, but “we’re hoping that this small program has national outreach.”
