Mayo Clinic tri-modal professional language services (in-person, telephone, VRI)

Purpose #

The language-services department of a private, not-for-profit, quaternary-care US institution (Mayo Clinic) provides interpretive assistance to LEP patients across its surgical and procedural areas, aiming to meet federal/state language-access mandates without delaying time-sensitive procedural scheduling.

Mechanism #

Assistance is delivered through three interchangeable modalities that serve as fallbacks for one another:

• in-person professional interpreters (the primary modality, staffed on-site for common languages),
• telephone interpretive services,
• professional video remote interpreting (VRI) services.

Telephone and VRI are used when an in-person interpreter is not staffed for a language, has too long a wait, or is otherwise unavailable, keeping interpretive coverage continuous. A written institutional policy strongly discourages family-member interpreters except in life-threatening situations when timely services are unavailable or refused.

"Our language services department provides assistance to LEP patients through the use of either in person professional interpreters telephone interpretive services, professional video remote interpreting (VRI) services." (Burkle, 2017, p. 2)

Example(s) #

Over a ~2.5-month 2016 study window, the program served 318 analyzable LEP encounters across 18 primary languages, with 79% in-person / 18% telephone / 3% VRI modality split, no cancelled cases, and a campus-wide annual cost of $5,847,000 across 43 FTE in-person interpreters.