PrintEarlier this year I wrote about how language barriers are creating a new digital health divide and I suggested that the single biggest barrier to successfully connecting patients online internationally is language. On the one hand, the Internet has broken down many boundaries and has changed the geography of healthcare, uniting patients and healthcare stakeholders all over the world so that people are not constrained by information available in their own country alone. Yet on the other hand, language has become an even greater barrier as it separates people into groups – the advantaged or the disadvantaged – based on the information they can access.
