“Stay Cautious While Translating Content Involving the Law and Lives.”
In this fast-paced world, where machines are taking over every industry, the healthcare sector becomes an exception. Although technological innovations have evolved the medical domain, effective communication between patients and doctors is still far from the grasp of machines.
Effective healthcare communication in a multilingual world faces complex language constraints. Then why not use machine translations to convert medical documents and get quick results?
Yes, on paper, machine translation sounds like a great solution for clear and enhanced medical communication. However, it is strictly recommended for all documents be HIPAA-compliant, limiting the use of machine translations.
In this blog, we explain why machine translations are not the most suitable option for converting medical documents.
Why is HIPAA Compliance Important?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), enacted by U.S. federal law in 1996, specifically safeguards medical patient’s sensitive information. The law sets up some guidelines that ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and security of Protected Health Information (PHI).
A PHI includes various content, like the patient’s name, address, diagnoses, medical history, lab results, undergoing treatments, and insurance details. PHIs are highly sensitive and must be kept secure at all times to protect the patient’s privacy. Any leak of PHIs can also result in severe legal consequences for involved entities like healthcare providers, insurance companies, and medical translation services.
Want to explore more on HIPAA compliance in medical translations? Check out this blog: HIPAA Compliance: How Does It Influence Medical Translations?
Who Must Be HIPAA-Compliant?
HIPAA compliance applies to several organizations, such as
- Healthcare Providers: These are organizations ranging from hospitals and clinics to public health dispensaries.
- Health Insurance Providers: These include specialized organizations like medical insurance companies and central Medicare programs.
- Medical Linguistic Agencies: Professional certified translation company that handles converting PHI from one language to another for effective communication between doctors and patients.
Challenges in Machine Translations for HIPAA Compliance
Oftentimes, to communicate efficiently with non-native speakers, organizations from the medical sector provide PHI in multiple languages. To accomplish this, some try to take shortcuts and translate them using AI translators like Google Translate, ChatGPT, DeepL, and Microsoft Translator.
While effortless, machine-translated PHI involves several risks and does not properly adhere to HIPAA regulations.
The reason being
- Lack of Data Privacy: Almost every machine translator stores the data it translates to an external server. By doing so, sensitive health information is at risk of being copied, stolen, or distorted without the patient’s knowledge.
- No End-to-End Encryption Channels: AI translation tools like ChatGPT and Google Translate are not obligated to ensure end-to-end encryption. So, translating PHI using these tools does not guarantee the security of transmission and storage.
- No Business Associate Agreements: A business associate agreement (BAA) is a legal contract binding the translator with the responsibility of keeping PHIs safe. As machine translation tools do not sign any BAA, they come under HIPAA violations.
- No Audit Records: Independent audits of translators are necessary to ensure they maintain following the guidelines under HIPAA rules. Unfortunately, with machine translations, conducting audits is impossible. Furthermore, translation tools cannot keep track of who accessed PHIs—another vital guideline of HIPAA compliance.
- No Patient Consent: HIPAA mandates organizations to obtain proper patient consent before sharing any of their information. Machine translations do not require this consent—creating a deep legal pitfall.
Professional Medical Translation Company
So, if machine translations cannot be used to communicate with non-English speakers, then what can be used?
The answer is a certified professional medical translation company like Somya Translators. As a leading translation company in India, Somya Translators perfectly blends linguistic expertise with legal compliance.
LOOKING FOR WORLD-CLASS MEDICAL TRANSLATORS?
Look no further than Somya Translators! Contact us today for immaculate medical linguistic services!
Here’s what sets us apart from a regular translation company:
- We maintain a HIPAA-compliant setup with secure and encrypted platforms for storing and sharing PHIs.
- Unlike machine translations, we offer expert human translators proficient in medical and legal industries.
- For sensitive documents like consent forms, we offer additional linguistic support like back translations. This helps us to ensure 100% accuracy in the translated content.
- Being an ISO 17100:2015 certified agency, we also specialize in providing exemplary legal translations. We can assist you in translating HIPAA forms, patient rights, and other regulatory documents into 170+ languages.
- We are open to signing business associate agreements (BAAs), ensuring all PHIs shared with us are completely safe.
Though machine translations are good enough for casual translations, they do not belong in the healthcare industry, where a single mistranslation or non-compliance with HIPAA rules can cost you from $50,000 to $1.5 million in fines.
In a world where machine translations are fast and free, professional linguistic agencies like us offer unmatched accuracy, strict privacy, and unwavering trust. So, if your organization wants to communicate with linguistically diverse patients, it’s best not to cut corners—rather, partner with Somya Translators, a cost-effective medical translation service!
Reach out to us today to explore the variety of services we offer!