When patients can’t fully communicate with their caregivers, their risk accumulates across every stage of care.
Dr. Richard Brecht
Co-Founder and Chief Language Officer, Jeenie
A dangerous situation arises when clinicians misunderstand patients’ descriptions of symptoms. Whether at intake, consent, treatment, or discharge, it’s no exaggeration to characterize many such exchanges as life-or-death. Limited English proficient (LEP) patients run this risk millions of times a day, as do doctors, hospitals, and insurers.
The need to ensure every patient has the same level of quality healthcare is why language access belongs in every “patient safety” conversation. In one peer-reviewed study from six Joint Commission-accredited hospitals, 52.4% of adverse events involving LEP patients were linked to communication errors, compared with 35.9% for English-speaking patients. And language support must be professional and HIPAA-certified. Family members or untrained bilingual staff had an 11x higher error rate compared to professional interpreters.
Recent peer-reviewed healthcare evidence for the cost-effectiveness of language access includes:
- 55% of malpractice cases come from miscommunication between patients and caregivers
- Doctors spend an extra 10-30 minutes initiating every interpreting session, which could add up to tens of millions of dollars of wasted provider/surgeon time a year.
Jeenie helps build quality and access into healthcare’s daily workflow. The Jeenie platform connects clinicians to qualified interpreters in 300+ languages, including ASL and rare or Indigenous languages, with average connection times under 8 seconds. It is supported by more than 20,000 interpreters and has a 4.9-star (out of 5) client rating. For low-risk interactions, Jeenie also offers AI interpreting with escalation to a live interpreter when conversations turn complex.
Approximately 1 in 12 people in the United States are at risk of adverse events because of barriers created by language discordance. Clearly, patient safety starts with every patient being understood, every time.
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