Health Care Interpreter Network Uses AHRQ Video to Educate Interpreters about Blood Thinners

The Health Care Interpreter Network (HCIN), a nonprofit national organization that provides videophone interpretation services to hospitals, uses AHRQ's Staying Active and Healthy with Blood Thinners video to educate interpreters working with patients who speak little or no English. The video is used to help explain and show how blood thinners work and why it's important to take them correctly. Interpreters at HCIN use videophone devices with Internet protocols that transmit high-quality video and audio over a secure private network.

HCIN helps hospitals improve service for patients who have limited English proficiency. Beverly Treumann, B.A., HCIN program and quality assurance director and certified medical and health care interpreter, says the video is a useful teaching tool. "Calls from anticoagulation clinics come in on a weekly basis. Helping interpreters understand the terminology and concepts providers use in an anticoagulation clinic improves accuracy when interpreting and enhances provider-patient communication."  

In 2010, HCIN surveyed interpreters to learn more about topics that were important to them and to help identify educational tools to help them better serve their clients. Survey results identified anticoagulants as a topic of interest. Ms. Treumann says, "The first thing we did was to develop a PowerPoint training module, Interpreting for Coumadin Clinics: Growing our Own, which we presented in 2011 at the annual conference of the California Healthcare Interpreting Association." The presentation included three clips from the 10-minute AHRQ blood thinner video, which was originally developed based on evidence from a patient safety grant as well as feedback from pharmacists about the need for a patient education video.

The training team collaborating with Ms. Treumann included interpreters from the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center near Los Angeles and Northern Inyo Hospital in the Eastern Sierra region of California. "The same training module was presented three times during 2012 at different hospitals, reaching a total of 146 health care interpreters across California," Ms. Treumann notes. The hospitals receiving the interpreter training were Contra Costa Medical Center, Riverside County Regional Medical Center, and the Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center.

With the support of grants from the California HealthCare Foundation and Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit, HCIN created an online portal that offers continuing education to health care interpreters called HCIN Learn (http://learn.hcin.org). According to David Cone, HCIN communications director, "The course currently offered online, Working in the Anticoagulation Clinic, includes three clips from the AHRQ video. After each clip, interpreters take a three-question quiz to assess content comprehension. Interpreters who want additional information are encouraged to stream the entire video from AHRQ's Web site."

Since the curriculum was launched in March 2013, 47 interpreters have taken the online training. They represent the following hospitals: Cambridge Health Alliance, Boston; Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, California; Hennepin County Medical Center, Minneapolis; Kaiser Permanente-Greater Southern Alameda, California; Nassau University Medical Center, New York; Parkland Hospital & Health System, Dallas; and the University of New Mexico Hospitals, Albuquerque.

Ms. Treumann adds, "Organizations that certify interpreters and translators have recognized the online anticoagulation course for continuing education credit. We expect to promote the course actively in the future and look forward to increasing the number of interpreters completing the online course."