Polyglot's mission is, in part, to "develop a collaborative environment with leaders in medicine, interpretations services and minority group advocates to understand, share, educate, and promote quality service to the limited English proficient patient population." In this spirit, one of the purposes of this quarterly newsletter is to distill information, share ideas, and promote educational resources to improve service to the LEP population and eliminate the disparities in health care.

A second part of our mission is to "build affordabable solutions enabling equal access to effective, dignified, culturally sensitive health care to all patients regardless of race, religion, or national origin." Accordingly, we will also bring you news and information about our language access products and solutions.

You can read our full mission statement here. We hope you find the information in this newsletter and on our website useful in providing care for your LEP population.


Dr. Charles Lee, President
Polyglot Systems

In August 2008, The Joint Commission began developing accreditation standards for hospitals that will promote, facilitate, and advance the provision of culturally competent patient-centered care. This 18-month project will increase national attention to cultural competence, highlight its intersection with patient-centered care, and improve the safety and quality of care for all patients. Additionally, The Joint Commission, in collaboration with the National Health Law Program, will design an implementation guide to prepare Joint Commission surveyors and accredited hospitals for the release of the new standards addressing culturally competent patient-centered care. The duration of the project is August 2008 through January 2010.

To participate in an interactive discussion about the provision of culturally competent patient-centered care, access the project's WikiHealthCare at http://wikihealthcare.jointcommission.org/twiki/bin/view/Standards/CulturallyCompetentPatient-CenteredCareHAP web page.

Healthy Roads Media (HRM) is a free on-line resource for multi-lingual, multi-format health information. HRM began six years ago with grant support from the National Library of Medicine to address health information access issues that confront vulnerable populations – specifically low-literacy and non-English speaking persons. HRM provides an increasing number of enhanced formats – audio, multimedia, web-video and iPod video – that may help provide meaningful health information access to diverse populations in varied settings. The information resources now include materials in 18 languages and over 100 topics. About 15,000 files are accessed/downloaded each week.

HRM’s website is www.healthyroadsmedia.org. If you are interested in partnering with Healthy Roads Media to share your resources, please contact Dr. Mary Alice Gillispie (magillispie@healthyroadsmedia.org).

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for the first Webinar in our series, "Language & Cultural Barriers in Health Care – A Growing Crisis." The archived version of the Webinar is available on our Website. We have also provided access to the panelists' slides and will soon be posting the panelists' responses to the questions not covered during the event.

In order to provide topics of particular interest to the community, we asked our Webinar registrants to participate in a short survey (view the survey results here). Based on this feedback, we are pleased to announce that the next Webinar will be entitled, "Leveraging Data to Improve the Quality & Availability of Language Services".

In this Webinar, you will learn how the systematic capture and utilization of patient data allows hospitals to more effectively target improvement strategies for language service delivery. This event will feature presentations by the following esteemed panelists:

• Sidney E. Van Dyke
• Helena Santos-Martins, MD
• Shiva Bidar-Sielaff, MA
• Cynthia E. Roat, MPH (Moderator)

This Webinar will take place on November 18 at 10:00 am PST/1:00 pm EST. Click here to reserve your slot.