Hosted VoIP

Public hospitals in California are going above and beyond in order to communicate with its non-English speaking patients. The institutions are taking very important measures to provide more than just a simple translation from its bilingual staff and a family member. Wanting to address this need for better multi-language communications in their facilities, public hospitals in Northern California contacted AT&T (News - Alert) and Paras and Associates to deploy a new communications system that can provide a solution to this challenge.

AT&T announced its involvement in this major project, along with Paras, to provide support for the Health Care Interpreter Network (HCIN), a system of shared remote interpreter services operated by Northern California public hospitals. The system uses video and VoIP technologies to provide a managed a call center service available internationally for interpreter services in health care and other service sectors.

AT&T and Paras announced on Thursday that they have now completed this “language bridging” project which involved the implementation of the Remote Medical Interpreter Bank in Northern California using video and VoIP technologies to sustain the HCIN.

According to AT&T, the HCIN project will be one of the first in the world to use video and VoIP call center technologies for language bridging. The system will also have access to trained interpreters in hundreds of different languages. This access will be available to participating health care providers in the HCIN, including San Joaquin General Hospital, San Mateo Medical Center, Contra Costa Health Services, Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center and Riverside County Regional Medical Center. These healthcare providers will be able to access interpreters at their own hospitals or at colleague hospitals through videoconferencing and various telephone technologies. This will help them to better communicate with other doctors, hospital staff and patients.

For this project, AT&T and Paras have signed a three-year agreement which calls for AT&T to deliver a converged, IP-enabled frame relay network to Paras to host the video interpreter service. This system will help support the videoconferencing and telephony technologies across the private IP-based network.

“The network delivered by AT&T will enable us to guarantee efficient, reliable and secure communications between locations, allowing health care providers, government and education facilities to access our network of interpreters and use our videoconferencing services to communicate with America’s limited English proficient (LEP) patients,” said Paras’ president and CEO Melinda Paras in a statement.

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Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet and Internet Telephony magazine. To see more articles by Johanne Torres, please visit Johanne’s columnist page.