Close Captioning Tools for patients and caregivers

[Jeanne Bank]

Virtual care has highlighted the need for better tools to assist with communication between providers, patients and caregivers. I have been asked to contribute to the sourcing of a closed captioning app/software tool as part of the virtual care delivery for my local health team. However the tool could also be used in clinics, screening reception areas, for ESL/marginalized groups, etc. I was just wondering if any patient partners in PAN have worked with these type of tools and have any advice on particular products or criteria to evaluate from a patient/caregiver use case. Please feel free to connect with me at : bank.jeanne@gmail.com

[Amy Ma]

In the beginning of the pandemic, Quebec Health Ministry authorized Zoom for telehealth, with certain settings for privacy (cannot record, cannot copy and paste from the chat, among other things).

At some point the switch was made to MS Teams for Quebec Health Ministry. It's not clear whether community clinics not affiliated with a local health unit were able to freely choose what platform to use.

All this to say MS Teams does have the capacity for live transcript, but its use is less common. I have seen the CC function often for zoom calls (non-medical related, mind you). But never for an MS Teams call.

Hope this helps.

[Jeanne Bank]

thanks Amy - that is helpful - I have not tried the MS teams automated scribing - the Health System in London is using webex platform and some Ont Telehealth but a lot of the CC software add ons don't integrate with webex, but they do with zoom. Personally I prefer zoom but it does get complicated to find the best integrated solution with the most accuracy . Once a decision is made, I will share this.

[Amy Ma]

Zoom live transcribe relies on AI, so it's not perfect. I believe they use Otter AI to generate the automatic captioning.

The only way to have accuracy is to pay an human via CART (captioning with a human present at the keyboard) and hook that up to MS Teams or Zoom or what have you.