New York-based telehealth company doxy.me has recently automated its localisation efforts to further make its platform accessible to more patients and providers in Asia-Pacific and beyond.

THE PROBLEM

Since the pandemic hit, doxy.me, a telehealth platform that began by facilitating virtual prenatal care for expectant mothers, saw a huge increase in its user base, from around 65,000 providers to more than one million. From APAC, there are about 45,000 providers using its platform, almost half of which signed up only last year. 

Having users from over 150 countries, the company realised that it needed an interface that anyone can navigate. 

"One of the biggest challenges we faced early on was entering markets that didn't speak English. For example, in Latin America, Spanish is a necessity and local doctors would repeatedly ask whether the platform is available in Spanish," Jacob Palmer, the company's international growth manager, explained.

Making the platform more accessible to people from diverse backgrounds has pushed doxy.me to localise. 

Early on, however, they found their process cumbersome and inefficient. They initially had to copy texts into documents, send them away to a translation service provider, wait up to 10 days to receive them back and manually upload the translated texts. For help articles, they had to reformat the document to incorporate the translated string of texts.

PROPOSAL 

Finding the process neither sustainable nor sufficiently scalable, the company later tapped Lokalise to automate its localisation process.  

Lokalise is integrated with Doxy.me's systems, such as Gitlab, Intercom and WordPress, to allow translated texts to be pulled back into the systems seamlessly. 

Doxy.me has also adopted Lokalise Messages which provides live two-way chat translation in Intercom. This allows the platform to respond to and assist real-time support requests. 

RESULTS 

Turning to Lokalise has saved doxy.me "hundreds of hours" when implementing translations, Palmer claims. Lokalise can deliver translated materials within three to four days, compared with other translation companies that have a seven to 10 days wait time. "This allows us to complete our implementation and launch of updated translations much faster than before".

Following Lokalise's integration, doxy.me now supports over 100 languages, including Chinese, Malay, and Indonesia with the ability to add new languages upon request.

The telehealth platform can now automatically detect the browser language of a patient's device, allowing patients to read prompts and messages in their provider's online waiting room in their own language. 

"Using doxy.me in a local language and specifically in Hindi is transformative," said Dr Monica Bhatia, a user from Mumbai, India. "It allows a provider to speak in the voice of the patient [who] feels more comfortable connecting with their provider and feels that their doctor is relating to them on their level".

She also thinks that enabling patients to see and read their local language in an online consultation "has made a huge difference and will assist providers to [provide] care more effectively for their patients".

"At doxy.me, our mission is to provide healthcare access to all and so by making our interface accessible in patients' native languages, we have been able to remove a barrier to care with the goal of providing better patient telehealth outcomes," Palmer commented.