Today Spoken Translation, Inc. and Bayshore Community Hospital announced that Bayshore will be the first hospital in the nation to adopt Spoken Translation’s product Converser for Healthcare, English/Spanish.
Converser is the world’s first interactive software system for reliable interpretation of wide-ranging conversations between English and Spanish speakers. Bayshore plans to use Converser in all customer-facing departments, aiming for one hundred percent patient satisfaction for its Spanish-speaking community. The hospital plans to introduce Converser into several departments initially and envisions that the entire staff will be able to use Converser within six months.
“We are very excited to be the first in the nation to begin using this innovative approach to interpreting,” said Bayshore Community Health Services President/CEO Raimonda Clark. “When used along with human interpreters, we think that Spoken Translation’s solution will help us to provide one hundred percent interpretation, 24/7/365. We are committed to providing the highest quality patient care for everyone in our community.” Dr. Mark Seligman, President and Founder of Spoken Translation, said, “We are happy that we can provide a reliable, constantly available, and extremely cost-effective product that will help Bayshore provide linguistically and culturally appropriate services to its Spanish-speaking community.”
During the beta-test period of Converser at Bayshore, the Director of Customer Service was urgently called to assist a Latino patient who did not speak English. The staff had been repeatedly instructing him — in English — to get into a wheelchair to go to the Radiology department for testing. The patient adamantly refused.
Newly equipped with Converser, the Director of Customer Service sat at the patient’s bedside and calmly typed into the program, “Sir, you need to go to Radiology for a chest x-ray now. A staff member will take you to the department in this wheelchair. Do you understand?” The patient was pleasantly surprised to hear the Spanish translation, as pronounced by the software’s speech technology. The spoken translation was played for him a second time — at which point he smiled, nodded yes, got into the wheelchair, and went off to Radiology.
“It is wonderful what we can accomplish when we all speak the same language,” remarked Wendy Brown, Vice President, Patient Care Services at Bayshore. “Converser made an important difference for this patient as well as for the staff.”
Bayshore Community Hospital has become the first healthcare institution to launch an organization-wide adoption of Converser for Healthcare. Bayshore is leveraging Converser’s ability to reliably translate almost any conversational sentence to contribute to its mission of providing excellence in healthcare.
Unlike electronic dictionaries or other communication tools, Converser for Healthcare is not limited to the delivery of pre-programmed phrases. The system actually supports wide-ranging two-way conversations, so that healthcare staff can say whatever they need to say. Moreover, the translations are verifiable: Converser’s Reliable Retranslation(TM) technology provides a translation of the translation, so users can verify accuracy for themselves. And if a word has been translated with an incorrect meaning (for example “right” can mean “correct” or “right-sided”), Converser provides a list of the word’s other possible meanings for quick correction. Text for translation can be entered via typing, handwriting, point-and-click — even speech. Bilingual transcripts are retained for the record.
About Spoken Translation
Spoken Translation, Inc. (www.spokentranslation.com), headquartered in Berkeley, CA, creates ground-breaking solutions for automatic cross-lingual communication. Its mission is to enable wide-ranging conversations across language barriers by building intuitive software systems combining automatic translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and its own proprietary technology. Spoken Translation’s flagship commercial product, Converser for Healthcare, is the world’s first interactive software for reliable interpretation of wide-ranging conversations between English and Spanish speakers.
About Bayshore Community Hospital
Bayshore Community Hospital (www.bayshorehospital.org) is a 225-bed acute care hospital located on a beautiful 37-acre campus in Holmdel, New Jersey. Its diverse array of quality services includes Cardiac Catheterization, Cancer Care Services, Diagnostic Imaging, Medical/Surgical, Emergency, Laboratory and Transitional Care. Bayshore Community Hospital is affiliated with Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, The Robert Wood Johnson Health Network and The Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
Bayshore Community Health Services is served by a staff of over 2,000 physicians, nurses and healthcare professionals dedicated to meeting and exceeding patient’s expectations. Bayshore’s mission is to provide high-quality and compassionate services and promote an environment of good health and well-being for the people of the community it serves. Whether it’s a surgical procedure, rehabilitation program, health education or screening, the Bayshore family of organizations is growing and changing. We’re changing, to change your life.
The hospital began in 1972 when a group of dedicated residents identified the need for improved healthcare for the residents of this area. Since then, the Bayshore family of healthcare organizations has flourished to include more than a dozen medically related facilities in Monmouth and Middlesex counties.
Contact: Dina Moskowitz V.P. Marketing Spoken Translation, Inc. (510) 843-9900 Email Contact Contact: Chris Domalewski V.P., Marketing & Community Relations (732) 739-5905 Email Contact
SOURCE: Spoken Translation, Inc.
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