Video Conferencing Resuscitates Hospitals' Interpreter Services: Page 11 of 12

"The Department of Commerce was looking to provide grants to hospitals to help them study the feasibility of and to implement new technologies to solve their business problems," Cohen recalls. In the HCIN case, it made the grant "to see if technology improvements could be made in the provisioning of interpretation services, and whether interpretive services could be provided as part of a shared network."

Cohen says the HCIN has met the goals of the grant and more. "It helped us improve the productivity of our interpreter services--and we've validated this by an outside review--by as much as 200 to 400 percent. And the costs of providing interpreter services is significantly less than what it would be if we had to purchase it through other alternatives."

Alternative interpreter companies such as Language One typically charge $1.90 to $2 per minute, according to Melinda Paras, the consultant who built and manages the HCIN, who says that fee is not a major issue "if you're using five minutes here or there. But if you're using hundreds of thousands of minutes annually, a per-minute charge is just not feasible."

With HCIN, San Joaquin General's per-minute costs have dropped to about 80 cents to 90 cents per minute. That includes the cost of the MPLS circuits linking the three hospitals, Cohen says.

Cohen expects the hospital's investment in the project to "come back to us within six to eight months, and that includes the cost of adding two more interpreters at its own expense. It's an extraordinarily good project. It's given us the ability to create a network that we can add facilities to and, as we add more facilities, the cost of operation improves as well."