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Google Translate is still not reliable enough to be used for medical instructions for people who cannot speak English, according to a new study published last week. Sometimes it works: it was most accurate when translating the emergency department exit instructions into Spanish. But most of the time, especially with less common languages, this is not the case – the study found that the accuracy was only 55% for Armenian. This is a big problem when it comes to health information, where any misunderstanding can be dangerous.
“All you need is a confusing mistake for a patient, and they either don’t take their blood thinners or they take too much of their blood thinners,” says study author Lisa Diamond , researcher on health disparities at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. At New York. “And you end up with a medical emergency.”
Federal guidelines state that hospitals and healthcare organizations must provide interpreters and translators for patients who do not speak English. The guidelines are designed to meet a vital need – these patients are at a higher risk of medical complications because they may not understand the instructions given by their doctors.
However, in practice, many hospitals do not provide interpreters for all patients who need them – they are expensive and many healthcare groups struggle to afford the cost. Even if a hospital has interpreters on staff or a subscription to a telephone interpretation service for verbal communication, it is less likely to have a means of translating written instructions. “There is an obvious gap in the ability to provide written information to patients,” says study author Breena Taira, associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at UCLA Health.
It has become common for physicians to use Google Translate in medical settings, Taira says. “You can imagine a well-meaning emergency service provider thinking, ‘I really want to give my patient instructions in his own language, and my hospital doesn’t have a mechanism to do that – why not use this. automated translation software system, ”she said.
The new study evaluated 400 emergency service exit instructions translated by Google Translate into seven different languages: Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian and Farsi. Native speakers read the translations and assess their accuracy. Overall, the translated instructions were over 80% accurate.
That’s an improvement from 2014, when an analysis found Google Translate to be less than 60% accurate for medical information. Google Translate got better in 2016, when it started using a new algorithm – since then, a 2019 study found it could be over 90% accurate in Spanish.
But the new analysis also found that the accuracy varied between languages. Like the 2019 study, it found that Google Translate was over 90% accurate for Spanish. Tagalog, Korean, and Chinese had accuracy rates ranging from 80 to 90 percent. There was a sharp drop for Farsi, which had 67% accuracy, and Armenian, which had 55% accuracy. In one example, Google Translate converted into Armenian “You can take counter-ibuprofen for pain” in Armenian to “You can take as many anti-tank missiles as you need for pain”.
Even languages like Spanish and Chinese, which were generally accurate, could have Google Translate errors that could confuse patients. An instruction for a patient taking the anticoagulant drug Coumadin read: “Your Coumadin level was too high today. Do not take Coumadin again until your doctor has reviewed the results. “It was translated into Chinese as” Your soybean level was too high today. Do not take any more soy until your doctor has reviewed the results. ”
One of the main problems with using machine translation is that it can’t take context into account, Diamond says. The program may not recognize that a word is the name of a drug, for example. “It loses the meaning of what you’re trying to say,” she says.
Over time, machine translation programs may improve to the point where they can accurately and securely translate medical information. But considering the way they are operating now, they are not a good approach.
Instead, doctors should write instructions in English and have an interpreter verbally review them with a patient, Taira says. But that’s just a stopgap – ideally, healthcare systems should give doctors a way to get professional translations of documents. Each doctor will do their best with the resources at their disposal. “What we need to do, really as a system, is make it easier for the supplier,” Taira says.
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