Many of our practices are multilingual, with providers and staff speaking the different languages of their patients and delivering care in these languages. Since facilitating patient communication is such a big part of what we do, we recently added support for Multilingual Messaging.

With this feature you can create message templates in different languages. Initially, we are adding support for email and text messages in several European languages, including Spanish, French, German and Italian in addition to English. Also, your voice messages can now be delivered in Spanish and French, with phone prompts also spoken in the language of the message. We will be adding more languages based on demand.

Multilingual Messaging Settings

You can keep track of the patient’s preferred language by entering it on the Contact Information tab of the patient details window. When it comes time to send an automated message to the patient, the matching message template is selected from your message library.

If a matching message template in the patient’s preferred language is not found, the corresponding template in your account’s default patient language will be used instead, so make sure to populate your message library with template content in all the languages of your patient panel to get the full rewards from using this feature.

Here are the steps to configure those templates in all the languages your practice speaks.

1. Enable the Multilingual Messaging feature by navigating to Settings→Account→Premium Services and clicking the Enable link in the Multilingual Messaging row:

2. Select a message template under Settings→Messages. Change the Language drop-down to the language of your choice and click the Edit button below the message:

After writing the content of the message in the selected language, click Save. Repeat this step for all template types and all the languages you would like to support.

3. Note that you can customize the default language of your patients under Settings→Patients. The language you specify there is automatically assigned to all newly created patients:

Of course, you can change it on a per-patient basis:

Just change the Preferred language field on the Contact Information tab of the patient details window.

When the trigger event occurs, the message will be sent to your patient in their preferred language:

Let us know which languages you would like us to support in the comments or by emailing support@docmein.com.