ALTA Language Services: The Exclusive Translation Provider for Northside Hospital
In Atlanta’s fast-growing healthcare landscape, Northside Hospital trusts only ALTA Language Services as its exclusive translation provider. Learn how our tailored services not only bridge language gaps but also enhance patient care and compliance in a multilingual environment.
Northside Hospital is one of Atlanta’s premier healthcare networks, serving nearly 2 million patients across its three full-service hospitals and extensive outpatient facilities. With over 29,000 employees, Northside has established itself as a leader in providing high-quality, patient-centered care to the region’s diverse communities.
Central to Northside’s mission is ensuring clear communication and understanding between patients and clinical staff. As Atlanta grows increasingly multicultural, effective language access has become crucial for delivering equitable healthcare.
That’s why Northside Hospital has partnered exclusively with ALTA Language Services to meet all of its various language translation and interpretation needs. With years of experience serving healthcare clients, ALTA offers comprehensive language solutions tailored for hospital systems. Its team of highly qualified medical linguists enables accurate, culturally competent communication with Northside’s non-English speaking patients.
This new collaboration aligns perfectly with Northside’s commitment to patient experience. By breaking down language barriers, ALTA’s services will help Northside continue providing exceptional care that is understandable and accessible to all.
The Importance of Language Access in Healthcare
Communication Barriers in Healthcare
Clear communication between patients and physicians is critical for quality care. However, language barriers can severely hinder effective patient-doctor interactions. This is especially true in diverse metropolitan areas like Atlanta. Over 14% of Georgians speak a language other than English at home, spanning a wide range of languages from Spanish to Vietnamese.
Consequences of Miscommunication
Without proper interpretation or translation services, language barriers lead to dire consequences in healthcare. Studies show that patients with limited English proficiency have higher readmission rates and more medical errors compared to English-speaking patients. Miscommunication can also impact health literacy, preventative care, and satisfaction.
Hospitals that provide robust language access saw improved outcomes. One study found that professional interpreters reduced limited English patients’ 30-day readmission rates from 17.8% to 13.4%.
With Atlanta’s expanding diversity, ensuring meaningful language access is crucial for Northside Hospital to deliver equitable, patient-centered care to all communities. By partnering with ALTA, Northside is investing in the communication support needed for quality outcomes across linguistic groups.
Choosing the Right Translation Provider: Why Northside Hospital Chose ALTA
Growing Demand for Multilingual Communication
As Atlanta’s demographics continue to diversify, Northside Hospital saw growing demand for multilingual patient communication. Its staff strived to bridge language gaps using in-house bilingual employees. However, it became clear Northside needed an expert, translation company to partner to effectively scale and provide translation services across three hospitals and beyond.
ALTA’s Exceptional Track Record
After extensive review, Northside selected ALTA Language Services as its exclusive translation agency based on ALTA’s exceptional track record in healthcare translation projects.
With over a decade of medical industry experience and certified translation, ALTA leverages rigorous quality assurance and advanced technology to ensure accuracy. ALTA holds a prestigious ISO 9001:2015 certification for its translation quality management system.
Specialized Medical Linguists
Additionally, ALTA’s team of over 1,000 expert linguists and translators includes specialized medical interpreters and translators. These experts grasp subtle cultural perspectives in addition to medical terminology in 200+ languages. This was especially attractive to Northside, given Atlanta’s diversity.
Other advantages include ALTA’s rapid turnaround capacity, cutting-edge customer platform, and scalability to handle large volumes of translations for healthcare systems. By leveraging ALTA’s services, Northside can provide trusted language access to more patients while giving clinical staff more bandwidth to focus on care delivery.
Comprehensive Language Solutions by ALTA
As Northside Hospital’s exclusive language services partner, ALTA provides a multifaceted suite of translation and other interpretation services and solutions tailored for healthcare systems. These comprehensive offerings of localization services allow Northside to offer vital multilingual support across its inpatient hospital settings, outpatient centers, telemedicine services, and more.
On-Site Medical Interpretation
Facilitating In-Person Communication
ALTA’s on-site interpretation facilitates clear in-person communication for doctor consultations, ensuring patients grasp health information accurately. ALTA provides experienced medical interpreters who bridge linguistic barriers and cultural gaps during exams, treatment discussions, test explanations, and any other bedside needs.
Rigorous Screening and Training
To ensure high quality translations, ALTA screens interpreters’ linguistic skills, medical knowledge, ethics training, and more. Interpreters receive continuous education on provider guidelines, medical terminology, and cultural perspectives. These rigorous standards give Northside’s physicians and nurses confidence that complex information is conveyed correctly between parties.
Over-the-Phone Interpretation (OPI)
Round-the-Clock Support
Complementing in-person services, ALTA provides round-the-clock OPI to assist Northside’s staff in communicating with limited-English patients remotely. This supports multilingual phone calls, video consults, and emergency situations where an interpreter cannot physically be present.
Immediate Accessibility
ALTA’s blended phone and video OPI means Northside patients can access an interpreter within seconds, 24/7. This allows Northside to provide equitable language services beyond regular hours or for rural areas. It also gives nurses real-time assistance with language needs, even late at night.
Document Translation Services
Translating Essential Documents
ALTA handles the translation process, translating Northside’s customers’ vast array of medical paperwork into 240+ languages. This includes essential documents like patient consent forms, medical histories, after-visit summaries, instructions, letters, and more.
Specialized Medical Translators
ALTA’s specialized professional translators and editors have extensive knowledge and medical expertise to precisely translate complex terminology on documents while preserving cultural perspectives. Northside’s patients appreciate receiving materials in their native language, which facilitates comprehension.
Advanced Technology Utilization
To expedite this localization process, ALTA utilizes advanced translation memory technology. This instantly references previously translated Northside documents to maximize efficiency and terminology consistency across the health system global network.
Multilingual Patient Education
Enhancing Health Literacy
ALTA assists Northside in its translation company, producing vital patient education materials in multiple languages and ensuring limited English speakers can effectively manage health conditions. This includes initial translations, translating brochures, videos, flyers, infographics, website content, and more.
Live Interpretation for Events
Additionally, ALTA provides live interpretation machine translation for Northside’s multilingual webinars, conferences, and seminars to boost health literacy across communities. Interpreters also facilitate Northside’s international patient programs.
Language Proficiency Testing
Assessing Bilingual Staff
To supplement ALTA’s professional translation offerings, the team assesses and verifies the expertise of Northside’s bilingual physicians, nurses, project managers, and staff. ALTA developed customized language proficiency exams specifically tailored to healthcare roles.
Customized Training Programs
This testing ensures Northside’s patient-facing employees achieve fluent proficiency to safely communicate health-related information. Those needing improvement attend ALTA’s healthcare language training customized for common hospital interactions.
Unmatched Quality and Technology
Rigorous Quality Assurance
Underpinning these offerings, ALTA provides unparalleled quality assurance through rigorous translator screening, editing checks, and process controls monitored by ALTA’s ISO 9001-certified quality management system.
Cutting-Edge Customer Platform
Additionally, ALTA harnesses industry-leading technology like its HIPAA-compliant Nuance customer platform. This consolidates all translation/interpretation requests onto a simple, secure dashboard to coordinate language services enterprise-wide.
Scalability and Efficiency
With ALTA’s breadth of optimized solutions, seamless experience, and relentless quality, Northside Hospital is well-prepared to deliver gold-standard care to any patient, no matter their native tongue.
Enhancing Patient Experience and Care by Providing Translation Services
ALTA’s language access solutions directly align with Northside’s patient-first mission. By facilitating clear communication, ALTA removes language barriers that can undermine patient understanding and comfort.
Improving Patient Satisfaction
Studies show that effective interpretation leads to higher satisfaction scores among limited-English patients. ALTA’s interpreters allow patients to express concerns freely while also grasping doctors’ guidance. This reduces anxiety and empowers patients to actively participate in their own care.
Likewise, easily understandable translated materials boost health literacy so non-English speakers better manage conditions. This further promotes patient engagement, deep understanding, dignity, and positive outcomes.
Meeting Legal Requirements
On top of boosting care quality, ALTA also helps Northside meet legal duties for language access. Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act mandates that healthcare facilities accepting federal funding, like Northside, provide language assistance and translated documents. This allows equal access to services for native speakers and non-English speakers.
Upholding Civil Rights
Additionally, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits organizations from discriminating based on national origin. Robust language access is essential for Northside to uphold Title VI compliance across its expanding health network. With ALTA as its partner, Northside is well-equipped to surpass regulatory requirements while making communication equitable for all patient populations.
Looking Ahead–A Model for Healthcare Language Access
As technology progresses, the project partners plan to implement cutting-edge solutions like video remote interpreting (VRI) and AI-powered translation tools. These solutions will make multilingual support even more convenient and scalable across Northside’s expansive health network.
This future-focused partnership also serves as a model for how leading healthcare systems can effectively provide language access. Hospitals can go beyond basic compliance by working with expert translation firms like ALTA to deliver truly patient-centered, equitable care.
At its core, this collaboration represents the shared values between the two organizations. Both Northside Hospital and ALTA Language Services strive to provide best-in-class service to all patients, regardless of background or language barriers. Combined, this partnership will continue helping Atlanta’s diverse communities receive the high-quality healthcare they deserve.
Ready to transform your healthcare organization’s language access capabilities? ALTA Language Services offers comprehensive solutions. Visit our Contact Us page to learn more about our specialized healthcare offerings, or reach us directly at (888) 302-4455 to schedule a consultation and discover how we can help you deliver better care to your diverse patient population.