ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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Dr. Jacobs is a Senior Attending Physician at Cook County Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Rush Medical College. Dr. Jacobs spends the majority of her time conducting research on access to, and cultural specificity of, medical care delivered to minority patients. She has conducted research on the impact of providing adequate interpreter services on the cost and quality of care provided to patients with limited English proficiency. She continues to do research in this area and has served on advisory panels for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Hablamos Juntos initiative to improve patient-provider communication for Latinos and several Office of Minority Health projects focused on reducing linguistic and cultural barriers to access to health care. In addition, she cares for patients in a neighborhood health center, works with other investigators to design culturally specific research, and teaches medical students, residents and faculty about practicing culturally sensitive medicine

Niels Agger-Gupta, PhD,

Dr. Agger-Gupta is a consultant specializing in linguistic access to health care and evaluation. He helps private and public sector health organizations design and conduct research related to language barriers to health care and advises on the design and implementation of cultural and linguistic competency standards. He holds a doctorate in Human & Organizational Systems from the Fielding Graduate Institute. His dissertation, published in 2001,focused on the emergence of and best practices in the healthcare interpreting profession in 14 health organizations across the US and Canada. The first Executive Director of the California Healthcare Interpreting Association, Dr. Agger-Gupta is a co-author of the California Standards for Healthcare Interpreters: Ethics, Protocols and Guidance on Roles and Intervention. He also previously worked with the senior management team of the Calgary Regional Health Authority in Alberta, Canada, helping them to develop healthcare interpreter policy and a process for interpreter implementation, and was a consultant with the Alberta Multiculturalism Commission between 1987 and 1998.

Alice Hm Chen, MD, MPH,

Dr. Chen is Medical Director, General Medicine Clinic, in the Division of General Internal Medicine, at San Francisco General Hospital. Her primary interest is in issues of health care access, particularly in how poverty, cultural differences, and policy intersect to create barriers to care. Dr. Chen’s work in this area has included developing culturally appropriate health promotion and disease prevention strategies and examining barriers to hospital access for the Boston Public Health Commission. Specializing as an internist, she was previously a Soros Physician Advocacy Fellow based at the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, where she focused on improving access to quality healthcare for limited English proficiency health consumers. She also was on staff as a physician at Asian Health Services, a community health clinic in Oakland, California. Dr. Chen was also Health Policy Scholar in Residence with The California Endowment, where she oversaw the foundation’s Language Access Strategic Grantmaking program. She has served on the National Advisory Council for Hablamos Juntos and as the lead writer for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Best Practice Recommendations for Hospital-based Interpreter Services. Dr. Chen also took a lead role in editing the annotations in this initiative to make them more consistent.

Adam Piotrowski

Mr. Piotrowski is an undergraduate at Stanford University where he is majoring in Materials Science & Engineering with a Mechanical Engineering focus. He is interested in pursuing a career in medicine and medical device development, incorporating advanced materials to produce cutting edge products and technologies. He hopes to apply what he learned from this project to a future career in the biomedical sciences.

Eric J. Hardt, MD

Dr. Hardt is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. He has been an active clinician-teacher for almost 30 years including 10 years in the New York City public hospital system and more than 18 years at Boston City Hospital/Boston Medical Center. He currently serves as Clinical Director of Geriatrics at Boston Medical Center and follows a large panel of elderly patients in their homes and at Roxbury Comprehensive Neighborhood Health Center. He has been a leader in the field of language barriers and medical interpretation since 1985 when he began to serve as Medical Consultant to Boston City Hospital Interpreter Services. He has been a founding member of several organizations including the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care and the Massachusetts Medical Interpreter Association. He serves on several advisory boards, has co-authored several publications, and speaks/consults widely on these issues. He has been an active trainer of both providers and medical interpreters.

All authors, with the exception of Adam Piotrowski, serve on the National Council for Interpreting in Health Care’s Policy and Research Committee.

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