Health insurance providers have to work with extremely tight timelines to ensure that patients receive communications and letters about their plans in a timely fashion.
Since California’s Department of Health Care Services issued APL 21-011 in 2022, California’s Medi-Cal managed health care plans have had to issue notice of action (NOA) letters and notice of appeal resolution (NAR) letters to patients in their preferred language (or preferred alternative format such as braille or large print) within a 72-hour timeframe. When mailing these communications to patients with limited English proficiency (LEP), this means the content must be translated, printed, mailed, and received within just three days.
Now, due to changes by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, this requirement is expanding out of California and will be standard across the nation. The 72-hour requirement aims to reduce delays in patient care, which can be detrimental to a patient’s overall health outcome. Still, this is a pretty tight timeframe to work within, and it may seem like the translation process would slow things down.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. At Avantpage, we’ve been working with California healthcare organizations since this regulation was first introduced in 2022 to develop a finely tuned process that ensures patients with LEP or disabilities receive translated/alternatively formatted letters well within the 72-hour timeframe. In the first year alone, we managed to translate 17,000 member letters. We can handle everything from translating letters to actually printing and mailing them — all while maintaining compliance with HIPAA and the requirements outlined in new regulations surrounding APLs.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the steps we follow for our translation to print and mail services to show you how we translate member letters and other important healthcare communications in rushed timeframes without sacrificing the quality of your communication.
Our Steps
Step 1: Receive the project
Our clock starts ticking as soon as you send us the content you need translated. Along with the letter you need translated, you’ll also need to give us various project specifications for the project so that we can complete it in a timely fashion — that includes things like turnaround time, target language, etc.
Once we receive a document and project specifications, we get right to work. The vast majority of our translations are printed and mailed out within seven to eight hours.
Step 2: Pre-process the document and assign linguists
Once we’ve got the content and project specifications, we run the document through AvantShield, our proprietary patient health information (PHI) masking software. This preprocessing step is absolutely critical to ensuring that our translations are HIPAA compliant; during this step, we remove all PHI from the document so that this data remains safe and secure.
After processing the document through AvantShield, we assign the project to a team of linguists to begin the translation process. In assigning linguists to a project, we take into account several factors—availability, linguist qualifications, location and HIPAA requirements.
Step 3: Translation Process
Once the team has been assigned to your project, we’ll begin with the translation steps. The linguist team will first translate the content into the target language, edit it to ensure accuracy and readability, and review it to make sure that there are no typographical errors.
After the review step is done, we’ll make sure to put the PHI back into the document. We save this step for last in order to keep patient data secure and ensure HIPAA compliance.
Our in-house quality assurance (QA) team, who runs further QA checks and gives the final stamp of approval on each translation. Our extensive QA procedures allow you to rest easy knowing that we’re delivering the most accurate and high-quality translation possible.
Step 4: Printing and mailing
By the eighth hour, your letter is translated and ready to go. At this stage, we’ll work closely with one of our highly vetted printers to ensure that your documents are printed and mailed in a timely fashion. We’ll send the document directly to the printer, so you don’t have to worry about handling the logistics of printing and mailing these letters yourself.
Once the document is printed, the printer will package and mail the letter to the patient.
Step 5: Delivery
By Hour 8, your letter should be in the mail carrier and ready for delivery. We allow the most time for this final period, since the delivery process is entirely manual. Because we complete the translation and quality steps so early on in the process, we have a little bit of leeway in case there are any delays in the postal system. Altogether, this process allows your patients to receive their communications in their preferred language in a timely fashion. This reduces the chance of delays in patient care, in turn, improving their health outcomes.
Summary
At Avantpage, we’ve been working with health insurance providers to make sure their clients receive information about their health plans in their preferred language as quick as possible, without sacrificing on translation quality. We’ve developed a fine-tuned process to ensure that translated letters reach patients’ mailboxes in 72 hours or less—here’s how it works:
- Step 1: We receive the document you need translated and your specifications for the project.
- Step 2: We remove PHI before assigning the project to a linguist team, ensuring HIPAA compliance.
- Step 3: Our linguists translate your letter and the undergo a series of quality checks to make sure your letter is accurate and well-written.
- Step 4: Once the translation is finalized, the letter goes to a strictly vetted printer who prints, packages, and mails your letter to the patient.
- Step 5: By this point, your letter is with the mail carrier and on its way to be delivered to the patient within 72 hours of beginning the project.
Looking to learn more about how we can help you deliver letters to patients in 72 hours or less? Contact us today at [email protected] or (530) 750-2040.
