How do you translate thousands of documents quickly and accurately without breaking compliance rules and without drowning in detail and manual work? Companies in regulated industries, like healthcare payors, face this challenge daily. Payors, for instance, must provide members with clear, multilingual communications such as Explanation of Benefits (EOBs) and appeals letters, on tight deadlines and in strict adherence with regulatory requirements. Mistakes aren’t just costly—they can damage customer trust and lead to financial penalties.
The key to managing these demands is to build a process that enables speed, accuracy, and compliance. In this post, we’ll explore strategies for handling high-volume customer communications, with insights from the healthcare industry to guide regulated organizations of all kinds.
The relentless demand for large-scale translation
Certain industries must deliver multilingual communications at a huge scale, and healthcare is a prime example. Payors must regularly translate Explanation of Benefits (EOBs), coverage determination letters, appeals, and annual notices to meet the diverse language needs of their members. Recent regulatory changes, such as the CMS 2024 Final Rule, have further increased the volume of translated documents required, adding pressure to meet these growing demands efficiently and accurately. The CMS Final Rule reflects a larger trend: as regulations change, businesses must be ready to adapt with processes that can scale to handle volume without compromising accuracy.
The challenges aren’t exclusive to healthcare. Legal teams in cross-border cases require accurate translations of contracts and evidence, produced under tight court deadlines. Financial institutions must produce compliant, multilingual reports and disclosures to meet international regulations.
These industries share a common challenge: delivering time-sensitive, large-scale translations while maintaining accuracy and compliance, against a background of ever-shifting regulations. Without an efficient process, the risks—financial, legal, and reputational—can be significant.
Challenges of large-scale translations in regulated industries
Translating high volumes of critical documents is no simple task, especially in industries like healthcare, legal, and finance. Translation programs in these industries must deliver on four essential fronts:
● Speed: Tight deadlines driven by regulations and customer needs leave little room for delays. In healthcare, a late Explanation of Benefits (EOB) or appeals letter could postpone a patient’s care or cause confusion about coverage. In legal and financial sectors, missed deadlines can lead to fines, reputational damage, and operational setbacks.
● Accuracy: Speed is important, but accuracy is non-negotiable. In healthcare, a mistranslated document could lead to a patient misunderstanding their benefits or treatment plan. In finance, an error in a disclosure could trigger compliance failures or misinform investors. Accuracy must go hand in hand with efficiency.
● Security: Sensitive data like Protected Health Information (PHI) or financial details must be handled with care. Regulations like HIPAA and GDPR require secure software and compliant vendors to protect this information. A single data breach can result in hefty penalties and loss of trust.
● Consistency: Large-scale translation projects require uniform terminology and formatting across different documents to avoid confusion. Centralized glossaries and style guides ensure reliability and clarity in every translation.
Managing this kind of work manually is a huge strain on resources. Coordinating translations while also managing fulfillment tasks, like printing and mailing, can stretch teams thin. So what are the best ways to solve these challenges and alleviate the huge amount of time required of managers and teams?
The 5 pillars of translation for regulated industries
After partnering with health plans for 40+ years, we’re experts at crafting processes that handle massive amounts of documents. Here are the foundations we put in place to help our healthcare clients manage their most demanding workflows and print trails:
● Automation for efficient processes: Automated workflows reduce manual effort, improve turnaround times, and minimize errors. These workflows integrate translation, editing, and delivery, helping clients meet deadlines without overloading their teams.
● Tech-enabled translation: By using custom MT as part of our automated workflows, we’ve helped clients turn around critical communications in hours instead of days, keeping them on track with regulatory and consumer expectations.
● Human expertise for better results: As great as language technology is, it’s still not perfect. So when translations require absolute precision, human linguists step in to check the output. This approach delivers the best of both worlds: efficiency without compromising quality.
● Secure, compliant workflows: Protecting sensitive data is essential. Our linguists are trained on relevant regulations like HIPPA, and our processes meet HITRUST, ISO and SOC standards, so clients can be confident their data—and their consumers’ data—stays safe.
● End-to-end fulfillment: Beyond translation, we handle every step of the fulfillment process, including document composition, printing, and mailing. This end-to-end solution reduces the amount of time and internal resources that our partners have to spend, and it speeds up the delivery process, too.
How LanguageExpress™ makes translation work at scale
All these approaches come together in our workflow tool, LanguageExpress™ ,built for healthcare payors and other regulated industries to tackle the challenges of high-volume, large-scale translations. By combining advanced technology custom machine translation, tech-enabled workflows, and industry-specific linguistic expertise, we enable organizations to deliver fast, accurate, and compliant multilingual communications.
With LanguageExpress™, translations are delivered in hours, not days, so you can meet tight deadlines. We train MT engines in your specific vertical to drive quality and precision and, when required, we assign experienced translators to edit to ensure quality. Our automated and secure workflows protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards like HIPAA and GDPR. For added efficiency, LanguageExpress™ offers end-to-end fulfillment, handling everything from translation to printing and mailing.
Available 24/7 and capable of supporting over 300 languages, LanguageExpress™ simplifies complex workflows, allowing organizations to focus on what matters most: delivering clear and reliable communications to their consumers.
Ensure compliance and eliminate the chaos for good
Large-scale translations in regulated industries don’t have to be overwhelming. With the right strategies and tools, businesses can deliver accurate, compliant, and timely communications every time. LanguageExpress™ is designed to help organizations meet these demands, offering fast turnarounds, secure workflows, and expert oversight to guarantee quality.
Ready to simplify your translation process? Contact us today to learn how LanguageExpress™ can help you deliver clear, secure, and reliable communications at scale.
