Doctors Are Using a Shortcut for an Age-Old Problem. It Can Be Pretty Risky.

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After one of his patients died, Stephen Hibbs believed A.I. could have saved him—at least, at first. His patient, a young Albanian man, died after a bone marrow transplant in East London. He was discharged with a complex postsurgery medication regimen to keep his immune system in check and prevent infection, one that had to be followed perfectly. But he stopped taking one of the medications too soon and he died before he could explain exactly why he stopped. Hibbs, a blood-cancer specialist, couldn’t stop thinking about it. His patient wasn’t fluent in English. Would discharge instructions in his native Albanian have been easier to follow? Could his death have been avoided? Could others?

Even when everyone speaks the same language, patients and doctors struggle to communicate about symptoms, treatment options, and risks. Adding language differences raises the odds of things going sideways. Anyone can be vulnerable, including while traveling, or with a cross-lingual medical team. With the rise of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and translation apps like Google Translate, healthcare providers have what seems like a cheap and easy way to bridge the gap in their lab coat pockets. But while these technologies promise to make medical communication easier and more affordable, they also introduce new risks of their own. And in a setting where a mistranslated word can mean the difference between an accurate diagnosis and a dangerous mistake, the consequences can be severe—or even deadly.

In the U.S., people with limited English proficiency bear the most risk. A 2024 research review in the journal Healthcare f ound that those with limited proficiency in English are more likely to experience serious harm from medical errors and receive lower-quality healthcare. That’s one reason federal law requires most providers to make healthcare communication meaningfully available in the language patients understand, via a human interpreter for spoken communication and a translator’s review for written information.

Yet finding a qualified human isn’t easy. Some 27 million Americans have low English proficiency, yet the entire U.S. translation and interpretation profession numbers just under 74,000, including plenty of people who work in non-healthcare specialties, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics . When President Donald Trump proclaimed English the U.S.’s official language in 2025, these issues worsened. The administration couldn’t repeal healthcare translation laws singlehandedly, Lynette Martins, a professor of health law at DePaul University, told me. But it could deprioritize enforcing those laws, and it changed critical government policies that had previously supported language access. Martins describes it as an “exacerbation of inequality.”

It wasn’t exactly subtle. The federal government’s new policy is to avoid providing translation services for people with LEP, unless the letter of the law or “mission-critical” practicality demands it.