Translation plays an essential role in communicating and interacting with patients of different backgrounds, whether it is clinical research conducted in different regions and at different sites, or a local doctor’s office in a multinational community. How can you build up contact with a person and gain enough trust to treat them if you don’t even speak the same language, let alone understand such subtle things as local cultural nuances?
Overcoming language and cultural barriers helps improve health literacy, patient trust, and the functioning and development of medical products.
Here are some ways in which translation improves patient engagement:
Adapting multimedia content: translating training videos, informative animations and infographics. This includes clinical gaming techniques that increase health literacy and engage patients in a more dynamic process than traditional patient-centered informational documents.
Medical Interpreting: Medical interpreting is often confused with medical translation, but the focus is on the oral aspect of the language, not the textual aspect.
Application/Website Localization: Telemedicine is becoming more common, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak. Adapting patient portals and websites into different languages is more important than ever to improve patients’ understanding of their health and enable them to make informed decisions.
Multilingual training: Training is a huge challenge for medical and clinical staff around the world. Innovative innovations and ever-changing regulatory policies are changing the face of the life sciences industry every day. Companies need to make sure that their employees have up-to-date, quality training, no matter what region they are in or what language they speak.
Undoubtedly, patient engagement is essential to improving global health equity.
Want to learn more about how translation can help improve patient engagement at your company? Contact us here.
