HCIN is vital to meeting the needs of the involved hospitals, he says. The voice and videoconferencing system lets interpreters at each hospital communicate more quickly with patients and health care professionals in different locations on the premises. In addition, all three hospitals can share their interpreter resources over the voice/video system, which is essential due to the variety of languages spoken by patients. The real-time link significantly extends the reach of the interpreters available at any one moment.
Language Barriers
The hospitals in the HCIN serve diverse populations that speak a variety of languages, including all the Hispanic dialects as well as Asian-Pacific languages and dialects. Although each hospital has several full-time, medically trained interpreters on staff, no one hospital can necessarily cover every language. "Having interpreters [at each hospital] for all those languages is almost impossible," Cohen says. "It would take an army."
In addition, due to the high volume of patients, interpreters at each hospital are also constantly moving from one area to another: to the ER, to admitting and back. This results in downtime as patients and staff wait for an interpreter to arrive.
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Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
