Medical Software Localization Best Practices

Medical treatment is increasingly moving into a virtual environment.

Things like telehealth programs make it more accessible to people in remote areas who would struggle to receive medical attention otherwise. This remote connection is supported by medical software as a service. As healthcare has moved beyond domestic borders thanks to technology, a need for medical software localization is growing.Medical software is uniquely challenging for translation. It’s a combination of content, technology, and regulatory limitations that not every company is prepared to tackle.

By adopting best practices around collaboration, automation, and security, it’s much easier to expand a software offering to new markets.

3 Best Practices in Medical Software Localization

Software localization is helping to make services more accessible. Medical software as service programs can deliver information to even the most remote regions, provided they’re translated correctly. Three best practices facilitate this:

1. Leverage a customer success team

Medical software localization requires the management of many components, including websites, products, and customer service portals. Simply having a localization specialist to assist you will limit your effectiveness because that specialist is likely only familiar with one company’s processes.Some localization agencies will provide customer success teams. This team should include translators with specific medical industry experience. These individuals will manage the complex jargon involved and be cognizant of regulations that may affect content. Keep in mind that medical translation is a unique linguistic subset, so any company you work with should be able to provide specialists in your target languages.The customer success team will be led by someone who has completed thousands of localization projects for companies of all sizes. Since they’re independent, they’re fluid when it comes to processes. They won’t try to fit your program into one that doesn’t work for your business simply because that’s all they know; they’ll customize the strategy based on your business’ unique needs.

2. Establish automation

In an SaaS translation, automation is a prerequisite; it would be impossible to keep up with all the necessary translation without it. With your product, you’re going to have a website, code in GitHub for your app, customer service portals, manuals, and marketing materials. All of these components will see regular changes that must filter through into other languages. A structured continuous localization strategy will allow you to manage constant language updates while still building oversight.In this, a crawler would monitor your assets for changes. When it discovers one, it will trigger a job in all your various languages, and the linguists would be automatically assigned and begin working right away. Once the completed content is approved, it would then go live. This is a seamless process that allows you to control all the moving parts of a localization project without a lot of manual oversight.

3. Follow an end-to-end process

Security is a top priority for any medical software localization project, but that may not always be the case for the translation services you employ. Those agencies might use outdated methods of managing content, like emailing it back and forth. This is not feasible when handling highly sensitive material. It’s better to choose an end-to-end localization management platformthat limits who can remove files from the system. Files are stored in a single encrypted place and cannot be downloaded without higher authorization. This limits the risk of a breach of sensitive information and protects intellectual property.

Establishing Strong Processes to Increase Your Reach

We’ve seen many companies attempting to enter several new markets at the same time. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work out well in most cases. Medical software translation is unique because you’re balancing content, regulations, and technology all inside a single project. Every language you add makes that process exponentially more challenging.A smarter method is to approach one high potential market first and get the processes in place. During this, you’ll establish translation memories, corporate lexicons, glossaries, and SEO strategies that will guide the content in other languages. You’ll build your process for creating translation jobs and linguist selection. If there are problems with any of those components, you can resolve them much more efficiently in a single language. With all this in place, it’s much easier to expand to new markets as you have the baseline established.Medical software localization can help increase access to healthcare while aiding medical providers in new markets. A robust localization process will build in automation, security, and collaborative teams to run programs seamlessly. These three best practices will help you create a program that streamlines market entry no matter how many languages you decide to target.Bureau Worksguides your medical software localization project with an expert customer success team built around your unique needs. To see our platform in action,request a demo. To discuss our total solutions,contact our team.