SPEAKING TOGETHER PILOTS QUALITY MEASURES

Speaking Together: National Language Services Network is a national program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation aimed at improving the quality and availability of health care language services for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP). Speaking Together integrates quality improvement with language services, and brings together hospitals to pilot new performance measures and test valuable techniques for reducing health care disparities associated with language barriers.  In addition, each grantee is also collecting data on two clinical measures that involve language access.

Language Access Quality Measures currently being collected by the ten grantees:

-The percent of patients who have been screened for their preferred spoken language

-The percent of LEP patients receiving initial assessment and discharge instructions from assessed and trained interpreters or from bilingual providers assessed for language proficiency

-The percent of encounters where the patient wait time for an interpreter is 15 minutes or less

-The percent of time interpreters spend providing medical interpretation in clinical encounters with patients

-The percent of encounters interpreters wait 10 or more minutes to provide interpreter services to provider and patient 

In this new issue brief from the Speaking Together: National Language Services Network, CEOs from three hospitals participating in the program give an executive-level commentary of why all hospitals and health systems in our rapidly diversifying country must pay attention to how and when the provide language services - and how they can better ensure effectiveness. To see the Issue Brief please go to:
http://www.rwjf.org/content/dam/farm/reports/issue_briefs/2007/rwjf30140