“I recently started to think about some of the implications associated with multiple languages in an EHR. One of my readers asked me how EHR vendors correlated data from those charting in Spanish and those charting in English. My first response to this question was, “How many doctors chart in Spanish?” Yes, this was a very US centric response since obviously I know that almost all of the doctors in Latin America and other Spanish speaking countries chart in Spanish, but I wonder how many doctors in the US chart in Spanish. I expect the answer is A LOT more than I realize.
Partial evidence of this is that about a year ago HIMSS announced a Latino Health IT Initiative. From that today there is now a HIMSS Latino Community web page and also a HIMSS Latino Community Workshop at the HIMSS Annual Conference in Las Vegas. I’m going to have to find some time to try and learn more about the HIMSS Latino Community. My Espanol is terrible, but I know enough that I think I could enjoy the event.”
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John, EMR and HIPAA, 13 January 2012
I agree with John and I talked and wrote about it a lot in the past 6 years. I often mentioned my discussion with the European Commission in 2004/2005 about exchanging records between different countries being a language problem, more than a technical one. But as John correctly remarks, using the right standards will solve this problem for the best part.
The free text/NLP part is a larger problem, not only between languages but foremost inside a language. We also paid attention to this on several occasions, like in this blogpost from 2008 “Terminology“.