Thursday, August 29, 2002

Helping non-English speaking patients talk to their doctors is a growth industry at Boston Medical Center. The hospital, which receives 120,000 requests for translators each year due to the high number of immigrants, spends $2 million a year on 29 staff interpreters who speak 17 languages. In addition, it hires outside contractors who speak another 30 languages. . . .

[A] new federal mandate that requires all doctors, including those at smaller hospitals and private medical practices across the country, to provide comprehensive interpretive services is causing an uproar among doctors and hospital administrators. As the number of non-English-speaking people and immigrants reach every corner of the country, they say that the $30- to $400-per-hour cost of providing translation services could be staggering for small operations, possibly even discouraging doctors from locating in rural areas. . . .

The disagreement revolves around a ruling by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services stating that physicians who receive federal payments, including Medicaid reimbursement for low-income patients, must provide at their own expense a trained clinical interpreter for all their limited-English-proficiency patients, regardless of whether the patient is covered by
Medicaid, Medicare, or a private insurer. Effective immediately, the mandate does not provide funds to doctors to pay for interpreter services. . . .

At Boston Medical, a Spanish interpreter costs $20 per hour with a two-hour minimum, hospital officials said. The hospital was once charged $70 per hour for a Hungarian interpreter. Their interpreters receive 10 weeks of training, including medical terminology and anatomy. . . .

Private physicians may spend between $1,500 and $3,500 a month for about 100 minutes of phone-interpreter services at vendors such as Language Line Services. They are charged $2.20 per minute for high-demand languages such as Spanish to $2.60 per minute for more specialized languages like Urdu. Certified medical interpreters, though, cost $3 per minute.