Health Care
2018 Leaders in Health Care, Achievement in Medical Technology: InDemand Interpreting
The Tukwila company is being honored as Leaders in Health Care.
By Teresa Kenney and Leslie Helm March 1, 2018
This article originally appeared in the March 2018 issue of Seattle magazine.
This article appears in print in the March 2018 issue. Click here for a free subscription.
GOLD AWARD
Indemand Interpreting
Tukwila, indemandinterpreting.com
The genesis of InDemand Interpreting occurred when a husband-and-wife team in Wenatchee one a health care interpreter, the other a technology expert felt there had to be a better way to help non-English-speaking patients communicate with their medical professionals.
The two combined strengths to develop InDemands video remote interpreting (VRI) technology. The company assisted in more than a million patient encounters in 2017 and is on track to increase that number by 40 percent in 2018. Now in its 10th year of operation, InDemand Interpreting offers services that are used in nearly 1,500 health care settings nationwide. It supports 26 spoken languages as well as American Sign Language.
The United States is now more linguistically diverse than Western Europe, says InDemand CEO Cecil Kost. One in five people in this country do not speak English at home, and about half of those dont speak it well or at all and are therefore considered limited English proficient.
Add to that an additional 12 million people who are hard of hearing or deaf. This is a burgeoning population of this country, and its the most underserved of all, Kost declares. … Put yourself in the situation of finding yourself needing care in a foreign country, and they dont speak English theres nothing worse. This is a very mission-driven company.
See the full list of Leaders in Health Care winners here.