Bilingual triage (Is there an APP for that?)

My Professional Communication students developed a visual translation triage system to assist non-Spanish-speaking health professionals delivering healthcare near farmworker camps via a mobile unit. The sites themselves presented challenges as well as the process of moving our applications from print visual aids to digital interfaces. 60 workers arrived at dusk, and one translator and 4 nursing practitioner students were to triage them for the physician and nurse in the mobile unit. Our best practices included researching sites prior to recruiting students, teaching foundational work in international and visual communication, building collaborative teams that included healthcare experts and native speakers of Spanish, and garnering institutional support from an on-campus clinic. Moving the translation system from print to digital presented other challenges. Our lessons learned included determining the most effective digital platforms, expanding our teams to include computer engineers, understanding the difficulties of an added layer of cross-disciplinary work and determining the fit of our project with NIH grants.