Supporting hard-to-reach healthcare professionals
In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, local ‘focal points’ have been set up to bring Health Connections International’s service as close as possible to those healthcare professionals who may not have access to the Internet. As Bijl told me:
“We work with the medical academies and the ministry of health in the countries where we operate. They create their own knowledge centre in the capital city, with small focal points throughout the country which are equipped and manned by local physicians.
“In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, we have twenty four ‘focal points’ on the premises of the ministry of health’s facilities, such as an AIDS centre or tuberculosis clinic, where local doctors who may not have access to the Internet can take their questions.”
Bijl says that the online model has allowed Health Connections International to continue to support medical professionals when other more traditional methods and have been unable to:
“What we’ve seen in Kyrgyzstan is that when many organisations had to halt their programmes because of political unrest and violence, we had an increase in user traffic. So even in political unrest, the work goes on.”
But Bijl is not content to stop at the existing online solution. He is already exploring new channels to increase the reach into low-income countries using mobile technologies.
“The next step for us will be to use mobile technology. 3G is virtually everywhere now in the low-income countries where we operate.”
Global collaboration
Amidst these examples of innovation in translation, TAUS supports the translation industry and aims to help the world communicate better through better translation, actively encouraging collaboration, sharing of knowledge amongst stakeholders and open innovation.
I spoke with Rahzeb Choudhury, TAUS’ Operations Director, about their vision for collaboration between translation organisations. He told me about the TAUS Data Association, a collaboration platform for sharing translation data, where Molina Healthcare is one of 40 founding members. This non-profit organisation provides an open platform for sharing translated texts into a single shared database which is a key enabler for experimentation and innovation, providing open access to language resources to help train better customized automated language solutions such as those used by PAHO and Languagelens.
The resulting repository of translations currently contains 2.6 billion words in 315 languages, including a giant corpus from the European Medicines Agency. The benefit of such a platform for healthcare (or any industry) can be seen by searching for a medical term in the free language search engine.
A glimpse of what is possible
From face to face physician-patient interaction in the United States to crisis response in the former Soviet Union, it is encouraging to see innovators establishing approaches and technologies that are breaking down barriers and achieving successful multi-language healthcare engagement. There is much still to be achieved, yet the examples here provide a hopeful glimpse of what is possible.
I am grateful to TAUS for their support in researching this report. My thanks are also due to the following:
Health Connections International
Molina Healthcare
SpeakLike
Spoken Translation
Daniel Ghinn is Director of Digital Engagement at Creation Healthcare
www.creationhealthcare.com
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