Interpreter-mediated physician-patient communication: Opportunities for multimodal healthcare interfaces

Patient-centered health care and increased efficency are major goals of modern medicine. Research has shown that higher patient health literacy is linked to more successful health outcomes and the shift to electronic medical records (EMR) is hoped to increase efficency. Although EMR systems are designed to support physicians´ clinical decision making, they can also hamper physician-patient communication, especially in the challenging conditions associated with interpreter-mediated interaction with low English proficiency patients. This paper examines EMR interaction and interpreter-mediated physician-patient communication. Based on a distributed cognition perspective that employs a novel methodology to simultaneously capture multiple data streams, we analyze multiparty and multimodal activity. The goal is to inform design of new multimodal healthcare interfaces.