One of the most important aspects of healthcare is communication.
Your patients should leave their interaction with you confident they fully understand the diagnosis, treatment, and any potential impact on their future.
Build Trust with Clear and Accurate Medical Information
If a healthcare website is written in English, and English isn’t your first language, it creates a barrier to understanding.
For Chinese speakers, including both Mandarin and Cantonese, the number has increased to approximately 3.6 million.
It’s important to note that these figures represent people who speak these languages at home, which may include both native speakers and those who use it as a second language.
The number of Spanish speakers has remained relatively stable since 2017, while there has been a slight increase in Chinese speakers.
If any of these people are living in the catchment area for your practice, you could serve them much better by providing all the information they need in their native language. Read on to find out why.
Improve the Patient Experience
Everyone, particularly those who are feeling anxious about a medical issue, want to be able to access the information that they need quickly and easily.
If they can access things like appointment booking and frequently asked questions in their own language, this will do a great deal to calm them and ensure that they can access the care they need.
Providing things like directions to your building and any entry instructions in a patient’s native language will help them find you much more easily, than if they are trying to translate from English.
Attract New Patients
According to the Harvard Business Review, 72% of customers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language and over 70% of people are more likely to buy a product from a website that provides information in their own language.
Over 50% of people said that the ability to obtain product information in their own language was more important than price!
Therefore, investing in a healthcare website translation could not only improve patient experience, it could mean that you end up attracting many new patients – particularly if competing practices in your area do not offer a translated site.
Providing a translated site also means that your site will rank for searches made in a patient’s first language, which will get more people to your site and more patients. For more information on SEO strategy for medical, healthcare and dental businesses, visit this site.
Ensure Patient Confidentiality and Data Protection
Any healthcare business that receives federal funding, including Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP are required by the Civil Rights Act to provide language access for their patients; otherwise this could be considered a form of discrimination.
There are also various requirements at the state level, so it’s worth ensuring that you are in compliance with all of these.
Ready to Localize Your Healthcare Website?
If your website isn’t translated, then it’s very likely that your patient will have questions that are unanswered.
If your website isn’t in their native language, they’ll likely call your business—time your team could save by offering a localized site.
This is especially important if your patient actually doesn’t speak good English because even calling in possibly won’t get them the help that they need if you don’t happen to have a staff member who can speak their language.