How to Run an RFP for Interpreting Services: A Practical Guide for Healthcare and Regulated Organizations

Choosing an interpreting services provider, especially if you’re a medical/healthcare provider, is a high-stakes decision. You may need in-person or remote interpreters; the remote interpreters may need to provide services over the phone or by video. You may need service only during business hours, or at night and on weekends. And you may need common languages like Spanish, or rare languages like Chuukese. All of this is possible, with proper planning and asking the right questions. Let’s look at five key steps in your interpreting services bid solicitation process. 

Step 1: Define the scope and objectives of your interpreting services RFP

Before issuing your RFP, you’ll need to clearly define what your entity is shopping for: what languages you have a need for, and what interpreting modalities will come into play. By issuing an RFP with clear specifications, you’ll ensure that potential vendors can provide you with accurate and comparable proposals. 

Regulatory compliance is a key question here. If your entity is covered by the language access requirements of the United States’ Affordable Care Act section 1557, you’ll need to carefully study those requirements and make sure that your interpreting services RFP targets those needs. Two potential issues to flag here: even if your entity has bilingual staff, they must be trained and qualified as interpreters in order to comply with the ACA requirement, so you may need to have interpreting services available even for languages spoken by your bilingual staff. Additionally, interpreting services must be high-quality, and available on demand. This can present a particular challenge if your entity handles unscheduled patient or client encounters. For example, a pharmacy doesn’t receive advance notice when an LEP customer comes to pick up a prescription, but must have on-demand interpreting services available, even for a rare language. 

To define your scope and objectives, ask these five questions:

• Where and how are interpreting services used? Does your entity use interpreters in clinical, administrative, or emergency settings, and are these encounters scheduled or unscheduled? 
• What languages are needed? You may also want to identify high-volume languages, and those needed only occasionally. 
• What interpreting modalities do you need? Are you looking for in-person, phone, or video interpreters, and do they need to be available on demand or on a schedule? 
• What service expectations do you need to meet? Is your entity open during business hours (i.e. a pharmacy), or 24/7(i.e. an emergency room)? What type of response time do you need from the interpreting service, keeping in mind that even in a setting with unscheduled patient encounters, it is generally considered unacceptable from a compliance standpoint to ask an LEP individual to “come back later” or to wait for an excessive period of time. 
• What priorities are you trying to achieve? Are you primarily concerned with regulatory compliance? Patient safety? Client trust? Is cost an issue?

Answering these questions will help you clarify why you’re writing the RFP in the first place. 

Step 2: Write clear specifications for your interpreting modalities and coverage model 

“Interpreting services” is a very broad concept. To get helpful responses to your RFP, you’ll need to provide clear specifications for your needs. It’s helpful to consider whether you need:

• On-site interpreting. If you need interpreters to come to your site in person, respondents to your RFP will need to state whether they can source in-person interpreters from your local area. For hard-to-find languages, do you have the budget to pay for travel time, and things like mileage, per diem, etc.? 
• Over-the-phone interpreting (OPI). Many healthcare entities rely heavily on OPI; our OPI best practices checklist is a helpful place to start. OPI is immediate (available on demand), gives you access to a wide range of languages without interpreters having to travel to your location, and requires no special technology other than a phone. Another option is clinical helpline phone interpreting (see our overview of this topic) where the interpreting helpline operators can connect study sites to study Medical Directors or other study personnel, around the clock around the world. 
• Video remote interpreting (VRI). In a best-case scenario, VRI can be a flexible combination of many of the advantages of on-site interpreting and OPI. It’s certainly worth considering, as your staff and the patient have visual contact with the interpreter, which can help make the encounter more effective. The challenge is that VRI requires a robust technological setup, including a high-speed internet connection on both ends (your site, and the interpreter), and a video device for both parties. Poor call quality can become a major issue if it causes delays or disrupts the flow of your entity’s operations. 

Step 3: When writing your vendor evaluation criteria, look at more than price 

Particularly if your entity has complex needs such as 24/7 availability or rare language support, interpreting services can rapidly become expensive. At the same time, medical and healthcare interpreting vendors vary widely in terms of how they evaluate, train, and quality-monitor their interpreters. Here are six questions to ask in your RFP, related to vendor quality criteria:

1. Describe your interpreter recruitment and vetting process. What are your minimum qualifications? Do these differ for common and rare languages? Here, it may help to give an example: are your minimum qualifications different for Spanish and for Tagalog? What type of background checks do you perform on your interpreters? How do you assess language proficiency for your interpreters who work in languages for which no interpreter certification is available? 
2. Describe your interpreter training process. How are your interpreters trained before they work on live assignments? Once interpreters are working for you, what continuing education do they receive? 
3. Certification/specialization. What types of interpreter certification or credentials do you require or prefer? If your potential vendors use U.S.-based interpreters, you may want to ask whether they require or prefer the certifications offered by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters, or the National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters. 
4. Quality monitoring and evaluation. How do you monitor your interpreters’ performance? Do you perform live call audits, recorded quality reviews, peer evaluations, or offer an option for client feedback? How do you address performance issues raised by clients? 
5. Corrective action and escalation. What is your process for handling quality concerns or complaints? How are these issues escalated if they are not resolved to the client’s satisfaction after an initial complaint? Are interpreters ever retrained, suspended, or removed from assignments? 
6. Do you use or offer pure AI or AI-assisted (hybrid) interpreting services? Just like every other area of communications, there are AI-powered and AI-assisted options for interpreting. These solutions can save time and money, or they can cause cost overruns and delays if they’re not fit-for-purpose; it’s particularly important to know how your staff can escalate to a human interpreter if the AI solution isn’t working well. For more on this topic, see our wide range of resources on AI solutions for translation and interpreting. 

Step 4: Clearly state your compliance requirements; consider providing some scenarios that vendors must respond to

To be successful, your RFP needs to attract vendors who can comply with your operational and regulatory requirements, and eliminate those who can’t do that. You should clearly state requirements such as:

• HIPAA compliance
• Regulatory compliance (FDA, EMA, etc.) 
• Data security 
• Interpreter credentialing 
• Interpreter confidentiality/non-disclosure requirements 
• Compatibility with your existing IT systems (interpreters must connect to a HIPAA-compliant video platform, for example) 
• Regulatory audit support: will the vendor provide what you need in the event of an audit, and how is this billed 

It can be difficult to select a vendor based on theoretical scenarios, and it can also be tempting for vendors to promise things that may be challenging to deliver. Scenarios are one way to handle this. You might consider asking your staff to identify some of the most challenging language-related scenarios they’ve encountered, then include those in the RFP and ask your potential vendors to explain how they would be handled:

• “Several times a month, our pharmacy technicians encounter customers who speak no English, and the technician cannot identify what language the individual is speaking. Could the technician call your OPI service to have this language identified?” 
• “LEP individuals who speak rare languages such as Chuukese and Amharic are sometimes admitted to our labor and delivery unit, meaning that they will require many hours of interpreting and potentially rotating shifts of interpreters. Can your service handle this?” 

Step 5: Make a checklist to support a defensible selection 

If regulatory questions arise, you need to be able to defend your selection of an interpreting services vendor. This means showing that you considered all of the critical factors when you picked your vendor, rather than just getting a referral from one of your employees, or choosing based solely on price. Below is a helpful checklist, organized by category, to help you prepare your RFP and evaluate responses to it. 

Organizational needs and scope

• Identify clinical and non-clinical settings where interpreting is needed
• Estimate expected volume (in terms of total minutes per day/week/month, or number of encounters)
• Languages required (potentially divide into common and rare)
• Service hours defined (only business hours, 24/7, peak times)
• Any growth expectations or seasonal fluctuations (new clinical trial starting on a certain date, office expects an influx of patients during cold/flu season) 

Interpreting modalities 

• On-site interpreting needs (if any) identified 
• Over-the-phone (OPI) needs defined 
• Video remote interpreting (VRI) needs defined 
• On-demand needs and scheduled appointment needs identified 
• For on-demand, required response time defined 

Interpreter qualifications and vetting 

• Minimum interpreter qualifications identified 
• Interpreter certification requirements (if applicable) identified 
• Vendors must specify recruitment and background check process
• Vendors must specify continuing education opportunities/requirements 
• Vendors must specify how rare languages are handled, including actual examples of rare languages that your entity needs 

Quality assurance and performance monitoring

• Call quality monitoring process described 
• Complaint submission and resolution process described 
• Interpreter performance evaluation process described
• Process for retraining or replacing underperforming interpreters described 
• Client feedback and escalation mechanisms described 

Regulatory compliance and risk management 

• HIPAA compliance needs stated, if applicable 
• FDA/EMA compliance needs stated, if applicable
• Data security/storage/encryption requirements stated 
• Regulatory audit support and associated billing clarified

Technology specifications 

• Platform compatibility with your existing systems, if required 
• Quality standards for audio and video calls defined
• Pure AI or AI-assisted features identified; can the vendor disable these if client requests?
• Accessibility features (captions, compatibility with screen readers for the blind and visually impaired) identified 

Vendor experience 

• Vendor must have experience in a similar medical/healthcare field
• Vendor must provide references from clients using similar services
• Vendor must work with clients of similar size and service needs
• Vendor must disclose all subcontracting or use of third-party service providers 
• Vendor must disclose where interpreters are physically located, if client’s operational or regulatory requirements demand this

Cost structure 

• Clearly defined pricing model (per minute, per call, flat rate per month, etc.) 
• Pricing differentiation by language or interpreting modality clearly stated 
• “Adjacent” charges (minimum charge, overtime, surge pricing, night/weekend) stated
• Setup fees disclosed 
• Contract term disclosed; penalties for early termination or incentives for renewal disclosed 

Finally, you’ll want to think of some checklist items related to your entity’s specific use case. If you’re relying heavily on AI or hybrid solutions, you’ll want to ask pertinent questions about quality controls, escalation to a human interpreter, and guidelines for when these technologies are and are not clinically appropriate. If you’re transitioning from one interpreting vendor to another, you’ll want to get detailed information about staff training, handover support, and whether the new vendor’s service level agreement (SLA) is identical to the previous vendor’s; and if not, how coverage gaps will be managed.

All of this is a lot to consider, but with careful planning, a well thought-out interpreting services RFP can help ensure that your selected vendor can meet your needs. In turn, this promotes better patient service, leading to better health outcomes and higher levels of patient satisfaction. A detailed RFP is the first step toward both regulatory compliance and better business practices, the keys to succeeding in a competitive healthcare marketplace. 

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