Patient Satisfaction with Translation Services

Numerous companies now provide remote translation services for hospitals. In this creative study, researchers enrolled 1201 parents who brought their children to a Denver emergency department (ED) and preferred to communicate in Spanish. Parents were randomized to receive interpretation services from a remote proprietary provider of over-the-phone interpretive services, a single medical interpreter assigned to the ED, or bilingual physicians. The study was funded partly by the telephonic interpretive services company.

The primary outcome was concordance between parents' description of their child's diagnosis with the recorded discharge diagnosis. Nearly all parents (95%) in each group accurately reported their child's recorded discharge diag…