#244 AI in Multilingual Patient Care with Jaide Health CEO Joe Corkery, MD

SlatorPod

Joe Corkery, MD, CEO and Co-Founder of Jaide Health, joins SlatorPod to discuss how Jaide Health is driving medical interpreting and translation with AI, bridging communication gaps for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients and improving healthcare accessibility.

With a background in computer science, medicine, and AI product leadership at Google, Joe co-founded Jaide Health with Julie Wilner, RN, in 2023 to address a long-standing need for real-time, interactive communication for the LEP patient population.

Unlike older machine translation models, which worked sentence by sentence without context, Joe shares how generative AI can maintain coherence, track gender references, and infer meaning from prior context — crucial in medical settings.

The CEO remains pragmatic about Trump’s executive order designating English as the US's official language and revoking previous language access mandates. He argues that such policies will not change the healthcare industry's commitment to multilingual patient care but may push hospitals to seek more cost-effective solutions — potentially accelerating AI adoption.

Looking ahead, Jaide Health is focusing on expanding into document translation, particularly for discharge instructions and patient portal messaging, areas where current solutions are slow or impractical.

Chapters

1. Intro (00:00:00)

2. What is Jaide Health? (00:00:53)

3. Professional Background (00:01:28)

4. Co-Founding Jaide Health (00:01:28)

5. Opportunity for Startups (00:05:59)

6. Communication Barriers in Healthcare (00:07:16)

7. Human Interpreters' Role (00:10:50)

8. Generative AI in Medical Settings (00:12:00)

9. Thoughts on Microsoft Dragon Copilot (00:16:44)

10. Implications of Trump's EO on Language Access in Healthcare (00:19:36)

11. Competitive Environment and ROI Challenges (00:21:41)

12. Product Development and Market Strategy (00:24:44)

13. Plans with Document Translation (00:26:17)

14. Challenges in Patient Communication (00:28:13)

15. Differences Between Interpretation and Translation (00:29:39)

16. Understanding Healthcare Needs (00:33:31)