Our Mission
Empower immigrant patients to access quality healthcare: BREAKING LANGUAGE BARRIERS by vocalizing patient education information in our native tongues.
As an Asian American cancer patient advocate, Dr. Tingting Zhang raised concerns on the scarce voices of first generation immigrants in the US health equity discussion as an invited panelist at NCI’s President’s Cancer Panel’s discussion on tech-enabled patient navigation in 2023.
Interviews with doctors and patients identified unresolved language issues to deliver care to immigrant patients: more than 46 million foreign-born people in US speaks many different native languages and dialects that may hinder our access to quality care, as 21 million immigrants speak English less than “very well” in 2022.
Building on our personal experiences and access to global health resources, we launched Hear2Care initiative to produce health education materials that can be heard and understood.
We have started our initiative on the topics of health education and cancer prevention in Mandarin Chinese, the third widely spoken language/dialect in the US.
We aim to expand knowledge and coverage in languages and dialects spoken by more numerous immigrant groups (Vietnamese, Hindi, Tagalog, Dravidian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Fuchow, Hokkien, French, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Thai, Burmese) and extend to other languages as identified by the ACS data from US census.
Let us work together to breakdown the language barriers for better care！