In healthcare, improving patient throughput isn’t just about speed; it’s also about balance. Hospitals and clinics everywhere are under pressure to see more patients, reduce wait times, and maintain the quality of care. Unfortunately, the barriers that slow patient flow aren’t always operational.
When the patient population includes limited English Proficient (LEP) patients, there are potential human gaps like miscommunication, delayed interpretation, and misunderstandings that can quietly erode efficiency, adding minutes to every visit and frustration to every interaction. But what if the key to better patient throughput lay not in scheduling and staffing, but in language access?
A clinic in Milwaukee, where LEP patients account for 15% of their daily visits, experienced more than two hours of unproductive time due to unnecessary interpretation delays in a single day. On-demand interpreting can eliminate one of the most underestimated bottlenecks in care delivery, providing instant access to medical interpreter services at any hour, regardless of the language.
This blog post discusses patient throughput, its common barriers, and how language access can improve efficiency, as well as optimize patient flow and satisfaction.
On-Demand Interpreting
On-demand interpreting is a service that connects users almost instantly to an interpreter through methods that match clinical workflows, whether launching directly from the EHR, the web, mobile apps, or over the phone, often with little to no waiting time. This expedited access enables healthcare providers to connect with medical interpreters in many languages and proceed directly to care.
Patient Throughput
Patient throughput refers to the efficiency with which patients move through the care process, from check-in to discharge. Through an operational lens, it’s a key measure of both operational performance and patient experience.
At its core, it can be measured by:
Throughput = Number of Patients / Average Visit Time
This aligns with Little’s Law, which defines system flow as the relationship between work in progress, cycle time, and output. In a clinical setting, even the smallest inefficiencies in patient flow can ripple across the entire day, reducing the total number of patients served and increasing overall wait times.
Common bottlenecks include registration delays, unavailable rooms, or communication breakdowns that arise from language barriers – all of which are central focus areas in healthcare performance improvement.
Common Strategies for Improving Patient Throughput
When facing this challenge, leaders in clinical operations management often target the familiar levers:
- Staffing and Scheduling. Ensuring adequate clinician-to-patient ratios and balanced workloads.
- Workflow Optimization. Implementing parallel processing, pre-visit planning, or templating visits.
- Technology Enablement. Using digital intake, electronic health record (EHR) automation, or queue management tools.
While these strategies are fundamental, they often miss a subtle but powerful operational constraint: language access.
In many healthcare settings, lost time waiting for interpreters is also a major challenge, and each delay in connecting patients and providers adds another obstacle to the care process. A 20-minute wait for an interpreter, for instance, can stretch into an hour of cascading schedule changes, frustrated staff, and patients left in limbo.
This often-overlooked barrier can quickly undermine even the most efficient workflow, making communication a major bottleneck in patient throughput.
Progressive Community Health Centers (PCHC) typically sees patients for 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the specialty, according to Dr. Raymundo Garcia Dwyer, Medical Director. He explains that “delays connecting to an interpreter create a systemic bottleneck – affecting wait times, disrupting workflows, and frustrating both staff members and patients.”
These challenges not only slow down individual encounters but also disrupt the entire clinical operation.
The Overlooked Solution: Language Access
Language access is not just a compliance checkbox; it’s an operational accelerant.
With on-demand interpreting, healthcare providers gain quick access to qualified interpreters in the languages needed for their patient population, including American Sign Language and other rare dialects. This connection removes a hidden constraint on care flow, all with a simple push of a button.
With this approach, cycle times stabilize, appointment slots are shortened, and most importantly, patients can feel heard and respected.
Dr. Garcia-Dwyer shared that “on-demand interpreting has been transformative, allowing PCHC to connect to a Spanish, Swahili, and American Sign Language interpreter within seconds.” He also added that “it’s been incredibly helpful for workflow, improving the clinic’s overall efficiency, communication, and patient satisfaction.”
PCHC’s Throughput Improvement
At PCHC, a federally qualified health center in Milwaukee, language barriers contributed to their throughput challenges. Around 15% of patients required interpreter assistance, but “it would take 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, to wait for an interpreter,” according to Teneil Taylor, Patient Service Representative at PCHC.
These long wait times led to rescheduled appointments and stalled workflows, which snowballed through the rest of the day, amid growing patient frustration.
With Boostlingo On-Demand, staff at every point of care could connect to an interpreter from their tablet in under 30 seconds, a 97% improvement in speed to care, all without any reduction in communication or quality of care.
PCHC’s successful results demonstrate how on-demand interpreting can improve patient throughput, not as a marginal change, but as a fundamental shift in performance.
Speed to Understanding = Speed to Care
Improving patient throughput isn’t just about staffing or scheduling – for clinics serving LEP patient populations, it’s also about improving communication in healthcare. Once patients and providers have the immediate ability to understand each other, care delivery improves, equity increases, and the entire clinical system operates more smoothly.
Learn how to embed on-demand interpreting into care workflows and unlock measurable capacity regardless of the language spoken. Book a consultation today.
