From Dusk to Diagnosis: Nightly Medical Record Translation

The Challenge

"Medical records from hospitals in non-English-speaking countries typically must be quickly and carefully translated into English in order to make them readable by English-speaking hospital and insurance personnel.

The U.S. Naval Hospital in Okinawa (Japan) turned to Prisma's language operations for such a need.

The Analysis

Each day, local doctors and medical staff in Okinawa, Japan, saw hundreds of patients, making detailed medical notes in their patient files--in Japanese.

Each night, many of those notes were sent via secure file transfer to Prisma's language operations team for translation into English. Dozens of files, each containing highly-detailed treatment notes, had to be expertly translated by professional Japanese-English medical translators, under stringent time constraints and HIPAA-compliant processes.

The Implementation

Prisma's language ops team developed a secure intake portal to receive the nightly upload, connecting it to a series of processing stations capable of handling Japanese characters, including both typed and handwriten text.

Once received, our team of (human) Japanese-English medical translators got to work, carefully rendering the content into English with a degree of accuracy and consistency necessary for both medical purposes and insurance processing. Turnaround times had to be strictly adhered to, given that the records had to be available for further review and processing by U.S.-based personnel within perscribed time frames.

All content had to be treated as PHI (Personal Health Information), and HIPAA-level confidentiality controls were built into our operations platform.

The Result

Solution
While AI-type tools supported the nightly content throughput, all translations had to be carried out by professional Japanese medical translation experts.

TAT
under 1.5 days

TAT
>97% on-time delivery

Quality score
>99% translation accuracy

Contract compliance score
100%

Impact

The nightly processing of large volumes of medical content from around the world--ensuring that accurate content is available for medical and insurance processing--is at the heart of language operations.

If you have a similar need or are wondering about how AI and human expertise can be brought together to benefit your daily (or nightly) flow of administrative content, feel free to schedule a complementary discovery call with Prisma's Language Operations Solutions Team.