By Mukundan Sivaraj · AIM Media House
AI has moved quickly into hospital language services. A 2026 paper in BMJ Health Care Informatics reported that 57% of U.S. physicians are already using or planning to adopt AI translation tools within the next year, a 30% increase from 2023. Translation now ranks among the most familiar clinical uses of generative AI.
The shift affects a large patient population. An estimated 25.7 million Americans have a non-English language preference, the same BMJ paper found. Hospitals have long relied on professional interpreters and translators to bridge that gap.
Written discharge instructions can take one to five days to translate at large academic centers and are sometimes deferred because of cost constraints. Now providers like Children's Hospital Los Angeles are testing AI tools to produce discharge summaries and other patient materials more quickly.
AI vendors say their systems can produce translations in minutes. Written Translation Moves First Spence Green, CEO of LILT, an AI translation platform, focuses the company on "high assurance" environments where errors carry regulatory or factual risk.
Its platform offers a "contractual quality guarantee," Green told AIM Media House . LILT is deployed at one of the top hospital systems in the United States for internal patient communications.
The system is configured to meet strict information security standards and can run within a hospital's existing cloud environment. Hospitals choose such systems, Green explained, because they need to know which models are used and how data is governed.
In health care, security and compliance reviews can take months before a tool goes live. That reality is visible on the ground.
Dale Lundstrom, a Spanish medical interpreter and language services education coordinator at Intermountain Health, told AIM Media House that his organization is still working through the vetting process.
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