AI, Risk, and Language Access in Healthcare | Voices of the Industry Ep19 w/ Andy Schwieter

Would you trust an AI interpreter in an emergency room if it had only been tested on 100 calls? 🏥 Marina Ilari sits down with Andy Schwieter, Director of Language Access at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and President of NCIHC, to talk about where AI truly helps in healthcare language access, where it’s risky, and why “it worked in our pilot” isn’t good enough when patients’ lives are on the line. In this episode: 💬 No Shared Language, an LLM-powered simulation that puts staff in a patient’s shoes 🤖 Smarter uses of AI beyond machine translation ⚠️ Why safety testing needs hundreds of thousands of cases, not dozens 🧭 Why human interpreters are here to stay, and how translators’ roles are changing CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 00:57 Andy’s path into languages and interpreting 03:20 From freelance interpreter to leading language access 05:30 Why language access matters for patient outcomes 08:15 No Shared Language: experiencing care without a shared language 13:30 AI beyond machine translation 16:50 Where to experiment and where humans are essential 19:50 Testing AI safety at scale 22:45 The future of interpreters and translators in healthcare ABOUT THE GUEST Andy Schwieter leads interpreting, translation, and multilingual patient communication at Cincinnati Children’s and serves as President of the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care. ✅ Andy on LinkedIn:   / andyschwieter   ✅ No Shared Language: https://nosharedlanguage.com AI Localization Think Tank https://www.ailocthinktank.com/ #AILocalization #LanguageAccess #HealthcareAI #MedicalInterpreting #MachineTranslation #PatientSafety #VoicesOfTheIndustry