Professional Medical Interpreters Influence the Quality of Acute Ischemic Stroke Care for Patients Who Speak Languages Other than English.

Background: The inability to communicate effectively in a common language can jeopardize clinicians' efforts to provide quality patient care. Professional medical interpreters (PMIs) can help provide linguistically appropriate health care, in particular for the >25 million Americans who identify speaking English less than very well. We aimed to evaluate the relationship between use of PMIs and quality of acute ischemic stroke care received by patients who preferred to have their medical care in languages other than English.