Point-of-care interpretation applications supplement but cannot replace professional interpreters for complex clinical conversations

Point-of-care interpretation applications can assist with timely, basic communication but supplement rather than replace in-person professional medical interpreters for longer or in-depth clinical conversations such as diagnosis, plan of care, procedural consent, and detailed caregiver questions.

Narrative synthesis #

The review draws a boundary on the appropriate scope of these tools: they support point-of-care nursing tasks and basic exchanges, but the authors (echoing Panayiotou et al. [ref 34]) hold that no application should replace a professional interpreter for in-depth conversations. This is a mechanism/scope-of-use claim about what the phrase-based and image-based designs can and cannot do. Certainty/GRADE appraisal is left for expert review.

"A healthcare application may assist with interpretation to provide care in a timely manner but does not negate the importance of in-person medical interpreters to translate longer conversations such as patient diagnosis and plan of care, consent for procedures, or in-depth caregiver questions." (Kiblinger, 2024, p. 4)