Leveraging Generative AI to Overcome Language Barriers in Healthcare

This study evaluated the dual capability of GPT-4o to both summarize and translate English discharge notes into Spanish, addressing critical language barriers faced by U.S. Latinos. Given that over 40 million U.S. residents are primarily Spanish speakers and that limited English proficiency is associated with adverse clinical outcomes, effective communication is essential. A dataset of 66 discharge summaries from the MTsample database was used. GPT-4o was deployed via the OpenAI API with a temperature setting of 0.1 and a prompt designed to simulate a medical translator using auto chain-of-thought reasoning. Each generated Spanish summary was assessed by a bilingual physician using a five-point Likert scale across four dimensions: Completeness, Correctness, Conciseness, and Writing Quality. In addition, automated metrics including cosine similarity and compression ratio were computed. Results indicated that the majority of summaries scored high on Completeness, Correctness, and Writing Quality, with over 80% of responses rating these dimensions as excellent, although Conciseness was more moderate. Quantitative analysis revealed cosine similarity values ranging from 0.44 to 0.90 (median 0.66) and Compression Ratios varying from 0.3 to 1.8, with no significant differences observed across medical specialties. These findings demonstrate that, under controlled conditions, GPT-4o can generate clinically accurate and linguistically fluent Spanish summaries of discharge notes, offering a promising complementary tool for overcoming language barriers in healthcare. Further refinement, particularly in enhancing summarization conciseness, is warranted to optimize patient communication.