CareMessage Announces Outreach Messaging Support in 61 Languages!
As we’ve mentioned previously, CareMessage is updating our product to allow for an easy customer experience in communicating with patients in their preferred languages! This week, we launched Outreach messaging support in 61 languages.
Meeting Language Needs, Improving Health Outcomes
Our customers serve a diverse patient population. Nationally, 25% of FQHC patients are best served in another language! That translates to over seven million people, and receiving care in the preferred language isn’t just a matter of convenience.
People with limited English proficiency are less likely to have a regular health care provider, have fewer physician visits, and have lower rates of screenings, such as blood pressure and cancer screenings. Unfortunately, this all adds up to an adverse impact on healthcare outcomes, including increased hospitalization rates, longer stays, and higher mortality rates.
Our Approach to Language Support
As a mission-driven, nonprofit organization, we focus on leveraging technology to help safety-net organizations fulfill the essential needs of underserved populations. It was a natural fit for us to use our product, engineering, and clinical expertise to expand our solution to help customers communicate with patients in many languages.
Over the past year, we’ve been researching, examining patient data, interviewing customers, parsing messages, translating content- and we’re excited for customers to start using our interface to send Outreach messages in many languages at once.
The Impact of Language Support
Our goal through the end of 2023 is to have our customers messaging 8–10% of patients monthly in a language other than English or Spanish. We’re encouraging adoption not only because we think this feature will help to fulfill our vision of improving equitable health outcomes, but also because we know our customers see the value of communicating with patients in their preferred languages- in a preliminary customer survey, 90% of our customers indicated that they believe messaging in additional languages will help improve patient satisfaction.
In the words of our Co-Founder and VP of Product, Cecilia Corral, “Customers are going to see a difference in the way that we approach languages, because we approach the problem from a different perspective. Our development is patient-first and grounded in the needs of underserved populations.”
Stay tuned for additional future Language Support functionality from CareMessage, later this year!
Sources:
National Health Center Program Uniform Data System (UDS) Awardee Data
CMS “Providing Language Services to Diverse Populations: Lessons from the Field