The Secret to Simplifying Health Plans’ Member Marketing Material Translations: A Parallel Project Path

We’ve seen first-hand the frustrations health plan project managers experience in translating their member marketing materials – including Annual Notice of Coverage (ANOC), Evidence of Coverage (EOC), Drug Formulary and Summary of Benefits (SB) – to additional languages.

The question for our CodyPrint® team became: What would give project managers visibility to the translation process, minimize the production timeline, and eliminate the iterative processes that increase the opportunity for errors in these materials?

The answer was a parallel project path for creating both the English and Spanish versions of these materials in lockstep. Rather than the conventional model where the health plan gives a translation company an English document to translate, the translation company does its work and then sends the translated document back, we developed a different methodology to create and revise English and Spanish documents in parallel.

Our Spanish Translation Service incorporates our CodySoft® automation software, which provides full visibility to project managers. The below process puts the power back in the hands of the project manager, and involves the translation company only in the translation aspect.

How it works:

  1. Translating Templates and Data: CodySoft Editor templates for each plan type, data grids and assets are initially translated to Spanish. After each round of updates to the English templates in CodySoft, the corresponding Spanish templates, assets and data grids are updated to match the current English components. Once the final English templates, data and assets are approved, CodySoft’s automation tool is used to create the individual English and parallel Spanish language plan versioned documents.
  1. Professional Proofreading: Professional linguists who are subject matter experts and have passed rigorous qualification standards, proofread the Spanish language versioned documents.
  1. Formatting/Typesetting/Desktop Publishing (DTP): Just as with English language documents, Cody’s translation subject matter experts review each versioned document for correct formatting and pagination, including page breaks, tables of contents, and headers and footers.
  1. Quality Assurance: The entire set of files are checked again against a comprehensive checklist to ensure that final documents are culturally and linguistically accurate, that the files meet any special requirements indicated by the health plan and that they are compliant with regulatory standards.

The conventional method of managing translations makes it difficult, for project managers to understand and track processes and protocol their translation vendors are following internally. It can also unnecessarily extend the production timeline for critical documents, and leads to a greater potential for errors in the material. CodyPrint’s parallel project path is the secret to simplifying health plans’ member marketing material translations.

If you’re interested in how you can gain more visibility to the translation process, shorten your materials production timeline and decrease the opportunity for errors, please contact us today.