Translation service puts doctors, patients on same page.

IF there's one thing that unnerves Dr. Val Warhaft, it's having a patient with limited English show up at an emergency room in the middle of the night with a hard-to-diagnose ailment--and no one around to translate.

In Los Angeles County, home to an estimated 100,000 limited-English proficient people, that scenario is not an uncommon one for the chief medical officer of Manhattan Beach-based Emergent Medical Associates, which manages 11 Southland hospital emergency rooms. That's why the doctor is looking forward to a cutting-edge translation service that should be operational in a few weeks at Olympia Medical Center, a Mid-Wilshire area hospital.

Language Access Network Inc., of Columbus, Ohio, recently signed an agreement with Olympia to provide live, 24/7 translation services using videoconference technology in 150 languages. The portable Martti (My Accessible Real-Time Trusted Interpreter) unit enables hospital staff in the ER and elsewhere to press a button and within seconds have a medically trained foreign language expert on the line who not only can talk with the patient but observe the kind of visual cues that can make the difference between a rote translation and an accurate interpretation.

Language Access has 30 trained interpreters stationed at its Columbus facility who translate dozens of languages including American Sign Language. For more obscure languages, it has a contract with a Portland, Ore. company to provide additional languages services via audio patch.

At $1.95 a minute, Warhaft expects the service will be a bargain for the hospital compared to the prospect keeping full-time interpreters on staff. If all goes well, he'd like to see the system in place some of his other ERs.

"In an emergency there is a very urgent need to acquire precise and prompt medical information," said Warhaft, noting that it's difficult to find translators in a timely fashion who meet stringent privacy regulations. "A word in one language, when it's interpreted, can be different than when it's just translated."

Olympia will be the first California hospital and among only a handful in the country to use the Martti, which Language Access President Andy Panos says is the only service of its type in the nation. The company recently signed contracts with the Walgreens and Kroger drug and grocery chains to serve other parts of the country.

"This is a brand new industry," Pano said. "We're really excited about the potential for this technology."

About 90 percent of requests from 204-bed Olympia, which treated 21,600 emergency patients last year, are expected to be in Farsi, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.

DoctorDirect.com Goes Live

After years of observing what does and doesn't work in ecommerce, Tommy McGloin has launched DoctorsDirect.com, a fee-based service that enables patients to make doctor's appointments over the Internet.

"For busy people who can't wait on hold during the work week, we enable them to make an appointment at 1 a.m. on a Thursday night or 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning," said McGloin, who was AOL's first Los Angeles employee and worked on CityGuide, Mapquest and Moviefone. "We think people will be willing to pay for that kind of convenience."

New patients also can download patient information forms, again avoiding the need to agonize over a thick clipboard of forms in the waiting room. For both conveniences, patients pay a transaction fee starting at $2 for a routine family practice visit. It's a model similar to the fee the moviegoers pay to buy tickets on Moviefone.

The service is no charge to the doctors themselves, which McGloin is banking will help grow his stable of participating physicians to a size that will attract serious patient traffic; the practices also are given a Web page. All doctor's offices are asked to do is train staff on the system, help set up the Web page and agree to set aside a block of available appointments for the service to fill. Around 100 doctors so far have signed up in the L.A. area, the company's test market.

"There's definitely a submarket for it," said Dr. Bernard Katch, who signed up his 30-doctor Santa Monica Bay Physicians practice. "When patients really need to see the doctor, they'll sit on hold for a long time but they won't be happy. I don't think it's nice to have unhappy patients."

McGloin said his service offers a functionality and convenience not currently offered on the Web sites of most health insurers and managed care providers.