Broader Access Drives Greater Understanding
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“MarketFully enables us to serve patients and their families more effectively by providing them with timely and accurate information online in their preferred language.”
—Jeff Stewart, Assistant Vice President, Digital Communications, VITAS Healthcare
End-of-life care is often a sensitive subject, and it can be particularly challenging for non-English speaking residents in the U.S. Cultural perspectives on death, combined with language barriers, can create misunderstandings about end-of-life care services. VITAS Healthcare, the nation’s leading provider of hospice care, recognized this challenge and decided that offering content in local languages through multilingual websites would help address it.
“We want to be sure our services are available to those who need them, without language as a barrier,” said Jeff Stewart. “We have always translated our printed materials and decided to provide Spanish and Chinese versions of our website to better serve these local communities online.”
VITAS needed a website localization solution that would free its marketing team from the time-consuming tasks involved in operating multilingual sites while ensuring high-quality, accurate translations that preserve the tone and cultural nuance of the original content.
“We selected MarketFully because it offered an ideal combination of automation for cost-savings and speed, with human translation to handle the nuances and emotional aspects of our content,” Stewart said.
VITAS evaluated multiple options and chose MarketFully to deploy, operate, and optimize its websites in Spanish and Chinese.
“The topics we deal with are emotionally sensitive and require careful translation,” Stewart noted. “That was a major reason we avoided machine translation. For example, when translating the word ‘death,’ automated systems might use the word ‘kill,’ which could alarm potential patients. Communicating about end-of-life care is an art form that cannot be automated.”
“The translations are not only timely and accurate, they are also culturally sensitive.”
—Jeff Stewart
VITAS’s small marketing team valued the hands-off, turn-key solution that MarketFully provided.
“Our marketing team is dedicated to supporting our 44 programs across the country and does not have the capacity to manage website translations and localizations,” Stewart explained. “We needed a fully managed process, and that is exactly what MarketFully delivered.”
Stewart also praised MarketFully’s translation of images. “I find great value in MarketFully’s selection of culturally relevant images to accompany the translated content. It makes our process much more efficient,” he added.
Stewart highlighted MarketFully’s proxy-based technology, which automatically identifies updates to the English website, notifies human translators, and publishes content to localized sites, typically within one business day.
“MarketFully’s technology keeps all of our websites in sync and ensures that our patients and their families always have access to the latest information in multiple languages,” Stewart said. “We occasionally have a local speaker review a translated page to confirm accuracy in the broader context of the site. They always approve; there has never been an issue.”
The Chinese and Spanish versions of VITAS’s website are helping the company achieve its goal of providing all patients access to hospice and palliative care while helping families understand how these services can maintain a loved one’s quality of life.
As the nation’s leading hospice provider, VITAS cares for over 16,000 patients daily and competes with thousands of local, regional, and national providers. Multilingual websites provide a competitive advantage and demonstrate VITAS’s dedication to serving all patients and communities.
VITAS’s localized Chinese and Spanish websites help the company provide all patients with access to hospice and palliative care
