Medical Interpreting Services

Prism Language Solutions provides medical interpreters to hospitals, clinics, mental health practices and families across the United States, in more than 300 languages, in person, by video and by phone. Interpreters are matched to the setting: CCHI or NBCMI certified where the language has a certification, experienced in consent and discharge conversations, and briefed on the specialty before the appointment. Scheduled appointments are confirmed in writing within the hour on business days; the intake desk answers around the clock for urgent admissions.

Last reviewed September 11, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Language Solutions

The requests come from two directions. A hospital language services coordinator whose contracted video line has no Karen or Rohingya interpreter, or has every Spanish interpreter busy at 2 a.m. And a family: the daughter who has been translating her father’s oncology appointments and has just been told, correctly, that she should not. Both need a person who can carry a diagnosis, a risk, a dosage and a question across two languages without softening any of it.

What usually goes wrong is not vocabulary. It is a family member who leaves out the frightening part, a bilingual nurse who summarizes instead of interpreting, or a phone line used for a consent conversation that needed a face. The rules on all three are written into federal regulation.

• Certified translations prepared to meet USCIS requirements
• Human linguists only, matched to the subject
• Fixed written quote within 60 minutes in business hours
• One office in New York, linguists in every state

Medical Interpreter for Consultations, Procedures and Discharge

A routine follow-up and a surgical consent are different jobs. For a consultation the interpreter renders the history, the examination and the plan, in the first person, and flags any point where the patient has plainly not understood. For a procedure or an informed consent conversation we send someone in person wherever we can, because consent depends on the patient hearing the risks, the alternatives and the option of refusing, and asking questions freely; that is hard through a speakerphone on a cart.

Discharge is where interpreted care most often fails, because it happens fast, at the end of a shift. A good discharge interpretation covers each medication and dose, the warning signs that mean return to the emergency department, and the follow-up appointments, and ends with the patient repeating the plan back. Where the discharge paperwork itself needs translating, see medical records translation.

Mental Health Interpreting Services

Psychiatric intake, therapy, capacity assessments and commitment hearings need interpreters who can render disordered speech as disordered speech, keep a client’s pauses and repetitions, and not tidy an answer into something more coherent than the clinician heard. We assign mental health work only to interpreters who have done it before, and we brief the clinician: speak to the patient, not the interpreter, and expect the interpretation to include what sounds like nonsense, because that is the finding.

Section 1557 Interpreter Requirements for Hospitals and Clinics

The federal rule is 45 CFR 92.201, which implements Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act and requires any health program that receives federal financial assistance, in practice any provider that bills Medicare or Medicaid, to take reasonable steps to give people with limited English proficiency meaningful access to its services. Language assistance must be free of charge, accurate and timely, and must protect the patient’s privacy and independent decision-making; a qualified interpreter must be offered where interpretation is needed. The rule also lists what a provider may not do: rely on a minor child to interpret except in an emergency; rely on an accompanying adult except in an emergency or where the patient specifically asks for it, with a qualified interpreter available; or rely on staff who are not qualified interpreters or qualified bilingual staff.

The same rule sets technical standards for remote interpreting: real-time, full-motion video over a dedicated high-speed connection, without lag or blur, with a clear image of the interpreter’s face, and staff trained to set it up. A separate provision, 45 CFR 92.11, requires a posted notice of free language assistance in English and the state’s fifteen most common other languages. More for providers on the healthcare page.

Certified Medical Interpreter: CCHI and NBCMI Certification

Two national bodies certify medical interpreters in the United States, and neither covers every language. The Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters (CCHI) offers CoreCHI and CoreCHI-P, open to interpreters of any language, and the language-specific CHI credential in Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin. The National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters (NBCMI) offers the CMI credential in six languages (Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese) and a written-only Hub-CMI for interpreters of other languages. For Tagalog, Haitian Creole, Somali or Karen there is no oral certification to hold.

Where a certification exists we assign a certified interpreter on request, and for consent, oncology, obstetrics and mental health we recommend it. Where none exists we assign by training and track record, and say which on the confirmation. Language pages for Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Arabic and Karen cover the dialect questions that decide a medical assignment; the full list is under interpreting services.

In-Person, Video or Phone Medical Interpreting

Each mode is right for something; the mistake is making the cheapest the default.

On-site medical interpreting is billed hourly with a two-hour minimum; the interpreter is assigned from the city where the hospital is, whether Houston, Miami or a county hospital two hours from either. Video and phone have no minimum. Guide rates are on the pricing page.

Why Family Members Should Not Interpret in Medical Settings

The regulation says no, and the research agrees. A study of interpreted pediatric emergency department visits published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine in 2012 counted 1,884 interpreter errors across 57 encounters, 18 percent of them with potential clinical consequences, and found errors by ad hoc interpreters (relatives and untrained staff) more likely to matter clinically than those of professionals. The pattern we see matches: a relative omits the part that would upset the patient, adds advice of their own, or does not know the word for the organ under discussion. There is also what a patient will not say in front of their child: symptoms, drinking, abuse, a wish to stop treatment. A professional interpreter is bound to confidentiality and has no stake in the answer.

Questions we get asked