Where does it hurt? Skype Translator applied to patient care

On May 27th at the inaugural Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Microsoft stunned the audience with technology right out of Star Trek.

Gurdeep Pall (left), who serves as Corporate Vice President of Skype and Lync at Microsoft, gave the first-ever, public live demo of an exciting new capability that is being developed for Skype. It makes possible near real-time audio translation between two people who are speaking different languages. It combines Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator using neural network-based speech recognition. You can learn more about the research behind the technology here. As Gurdeep explained in his blog post about Skype Translator, “Skype Translator opens up so many possibilities to make meaningful connections in ways you never could before in education, diplomacy, multilingual families and in business.”

Although Gurdeep didn’t call this one out specifically, as a physician, when I saw Skype Translator in action I immediately thought of how it might be applied to patient care. Today we live in a globally connected world across geographies, cultures and languages. Visit an emergency room, trauma center, hospital or clinic in any major metropolitan area of just about any large country and what do you find? You find people from diverse cultures, many of whom speak a language that is different from that of clinical staff. When one of these patients shows up, hospital or clinic employees must scramble to find someone on staff who speaks the language of the presenting patient and can serve as an interpreter during the clinical exam. If such a person can’t be found, staff must resort to using a company that provides on-demand, and often very expensive, translation services. It’s a process that is anything but efficient.