Our commitment is to ensure the utmost quality standards in the market, providing highly specialized translations and high-quality medical writing services. In response to the needs of a regulated and technically advanced sector, our dynamic and innovative team stands out for its extensive experience and collaboration with highly qualified professionals.

Indeed, we believe that the quality of translations in the medical and life sciences fields should result from years of experience and synergy between professional translators and experts in various scientific disciplines. From biology to pharmaceutical sciences, from medicine to biotechnology, academic training should form the basis of the skills required to deliver precise, accurate translations that adhere to industry standards.

Translation, post-editing, and localization share the same goal: to perfectly adapt medical-scientific texts according to the regulations and customs of each geographical area.

Related:

• An Overview of Regulatory Writing in Italy
• WHO 2023: Engaging Patients for Patient Safety

Comprehensive linguistic services for life sciences

In our endeavor to provide a truly comprehensive service, our range of linguistic services for life sciences extends beyond mere language conversion to include medical writing (or regulatory writing) as well. This discipline is crucial in the context of medical-scientific communication.

Medical writing encompasses tasks such as drafting informative texts, composing scientific papers, and producing regulatory documents. This approach aims to ensure impeccable documents both technically and linguistically, meeting the communication and compliance needs of our clients.

This principle also extends to our interpreting services, whether simultaneous, consecutive, or whispered.

Our professionals boast strong academic backgrounds and established careers. They serve as authentic mediators, bringing added value to your international professional relationships.

Our interpreting service focuses on specific sectors, including medical, scientific, technical, legal, and commercial fields. Thanks to our team of interpreters proficient in both language and relevant technical jargon, you can successfully conduct negotiations and meetings in foreign languages. Including those of a more delicate nature.

For more information about the various services mentioned, click on the respective highlighted links below:

Translation – Medical writing – Interpreting

L'articolo Life Science: Comprehensive Linguistic Services proviene da ASTW.

At the close of 2023, the Heads of Medicines Agencies (HMA), the European Commission, and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) jointly released electronic product information (ePI) for certain human medicines, marking the first-ever publication of such electronic information.

When it comes to pharmaceuticals products, the information must encompass various product characteristics, labelling details, and package inserts. These documents are mandatory accompaniments for any authorized medicinal product within the European Union, offering precise information regarding their usage and prescription.

Currently, they can be readily found online, within the websites of various regulatory authorities (in PDF format), as well as in print within the packaging of pharmaceuticals.

“Digital platforms open new possibilities to share this information electronically, keep it constantly updated and make it more accessible to end-users such as healthcare professionals and patients.” With these words, the European Commission introduces this new initiative, a pilot program designed to test a novel model for publishing digital medical information on pharmaceuticals.

Related:

• Introducing the European Medical Device Vigilance System
• WHO 2023 – Engaging Patients for Patient Safety

EU Platform and Digital Medical Information

As can be read on the EMA and European Commission websites: “Transitioning to ePI offers advantages such as improved accessibility, searchability and multilingual capabilities”.  […] These ePIs were created following the EU ePI Common Standard, adopted by the European medicines regulatory network to provide a consistent structure throughout all Member States and ensure the information works across different e-health platforms”.

The initiative falls within the scope of the Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe and involves 25 medicines.

The initial ePI publications encompass medicines evaluated by EMA or by national authorities in Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden. These have been drafted in English for centrally approved medicines and in the local language for nationally approved drugs.

Testing is currently underway to enable access in all languages of the Union.

For those seeking further details, these documents can be viewed on the Product Lifecycle Management Portal. More information can be found by consulting the dedicated pages on the websites of the European Commission and the EMA.

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L'articolo Digital Medical Information in the European Union proviene da ASTW.

The focus of 2023 was to be a recognition of the crucial role that patients, families and healthcare professionals play in ensuring the health safety for everybody. Through the slogan “Elevate the voice of patients“, WHO wanted to turn the spotlight on the work of all stakeholders.

Work and commitment capable of ensuring a fruitful involvement of the patient in the formulation and management of their care.

This is because, as well expressed by the Organization: “Evidence shows that when patients are treated as partners in their care, significant gains are made in safety, patient satisfaction and health outcomes. By becoming active members of the health care team, patients can contribute to the safety of their care and that of the health care system as a whole.”

For all this to happen, this year’s event proposed four main objectives:

• Raise global awareness of the need for active engagement of patients and their families and caregivers in all settings and at all levels of health care.
• Engage policymakers, health care leaders, health and care workers, patients’ organizations, civil society in the effort.
• Empower patients and families to be actively involved in their own health care.
• Advocate urgent action on patient and family engagement.

A small part of this mission can be carried out by language service providers, who are committed to guaranteeing linguistic access to doctors and patients.

Engaging patients: The Role of Translators and Interpreters

“Safe health care is a partnership, in which everybody has a role to play. , and most importantly patients themselves. ”

With this quote, taken from the contribution of Dr. Liam Donaldson (published on the WHO website) we want to take up a topic already covered within our channels.

See also:

• Translation and Clinical Trials: How to Seize Opportunities
• Life Science Translations and The Use of Cat Tools

Patient involvement, as we have seen, is still one of the great challenges for health systems today.

Action that for some patients is even more difficult and complicated.

We talk about all those cases where stakeholders do not share the same linguistic system and/or cultural heritage. How is it possible to include the patient in the process of care and healing, if it is not possible to have clear and complete communication with them?

Language barriers are an obstacle in various professional fields, but one of the most affected by its negative aspects is the medical one.

Medical translation can break down these barriers, allowing patients to be involved for their own safety. Indiscriminately.

To learn more about medical translation and medical writing services, follow the orange links.

L'articolo WHO 2023: Engaging Patients for Patient Safety proviene da ASTW.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud system created by the Seattle giant in 2006. Since then, AWS has continuously experimented and included in its offer the most diverse services aimed at reducing the workload for professionals in various sectors.

From data processing to storage, from database management to augmented reality. As anticipated, the latest system developed by Amazon (or rather, AWS) is intended for medical staff with the aim of reducing the daily effort required for the compilation of patient medical records and the related data entry in electronic medical records.

Benefits: more time available to patients and less risk of burnout. Generative AI has found great application in various professional fields and promises great results in the health sector as well.

Related:

• Translation and Clinical Trials: How to Seize Opportunities

Amazon AWS, HealthScribe, and clinical documentation

Big promises and lots of expectations, but how does it work?

This new system combines speech recognition with generative artificial intelligence to automatically create preliminary clinical documentation from doctor-patient conversations.

Speech recognition allows the professional to free themselves from the burden of transcribing the conversations, automatically noting what has been said by both parties during medical examinations.

This technology is widely used by users around the world in various fields of application.

Over the years, numerous technology companies have developed systems of this type, designed to best meet the needs of users in different sectors of use. These include AWS, which in 2019 launched its own Transcribe Medical, able to report and track the information provided to the doctor by individual patients.

The next step offered by HealthScribe is enabled using a generative artificial intelligence system capable of processing transcripts and independently writing electronic medical records, extracting only the relevant information, and identifying the key terms for diagnosis.

However, there is no shortage of critical issues highlighted by various stakeholders, starting with the lack of data relating to the accuracy of the service. The concerns also include the possible biases involved in this type of system and the dangers resulting from a lack of supervision of what has been transcribed and processed.

For now, we can only await further details.

Useful links:

• ASTW Medical Translation
• Amazon Press Center

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L'articolo Amazon and Generative AI for Clinical Documentation proviene da ASTW.

Linguistic accessibility has considerable importance in several sectors by allowing to reach a wider slice of population and ensuring correct communication between the parties. Among these, we clearly find the medical, pharmaceutical, and life science fields.

Related articles:

• Life Science Translations and The Use of Cat Tools
• Medical Translation and The Services Offered by Astw

As partially anticipated, the main objective of a clinical trial is to verify whether a new health approach can be advantageous if compared to the current state of the art. In experimental clinical trials, it is therefore crucial to sufficiently expand the number of participants so as not to spoil the results obtained by limiting the scope of the research.

So, to assess whether any improvements found are directly attributable to the novelty under study, an adequate number of subjects must be included in the research to ensure its full validity.

In this context, translation can play a crucial role in seeking consensus from the individuals involved in the clinical trial, allowing them to have access to accurate and easily understandable information about the purpose of the research, how it will be carried out, and the known risks and benefits.

Translation in Clinical Trials

A study recently published in Nature aimed at identifying how the costs related to translation services can negatively affect progress in the medical field, excessively limiting participation in clinical trials.

As reported by Rocio Txabarriaga in his contribution to Slator: “The researchers explained that [in the United States] in 43.8% of the consent events for the evaluated sponsored studies, the patient had signed a document in a language other than the main language. In unsponsored studies, less than 1% of patients signed consent documents in their native language ”.

This data is most likely due to a language barrier between the parties involved. This may cause plausible misunderstandings, a lack of full knowledge of the information, and the risk of undergoing studies unsuitable for their conditions.  

In addition, another relevant piece of data concerns unsponsored studies, in which a very small number of people speaking a language different from that used by researchers participate on average.

Thanks to translation services, it is easy to expand the number of languages in which patients can become aware of the clinical trial in its entirety, increasing inclusiveness and stimulating greater participation.

To date, the gold standard in the world of professional translation is represented by the human-technology combination, which can ensure high quality levels at reduced costs.

Let’s give it a chance.

For further information, visit our dedicated page.

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L'articolo Translation and Clinical Trials: How to Seize Opportunities proviene da ASTW.