It is a familiar scenario for anyone who has traveled internationally: You find yourself in a situation where your language isn’t spoken, and communication is a challenge. Hand signals and body language can only go so far, and it is difficult to accurately convey and receive information when such a language barrier exists.
Dr. George Ciporkin encountered such a situation several years ago while traveling in Fortaleza, Brazil. “I walked into a cool art shop in the city that featured works by local artists,” he says.
Intrigued by the art pieces, Ciporkin attempted to ask a store attendant for more information. As a Spanish speaker, Ciporkin hoped that his language was similar enough to Brazil’s primary language, Portuguese, to make a conversation possible. “I soon realized that I couldn’t communicate with anyone in the store, not in Spanish or English,” he recalls. “And later, I asked myself what would happen if I had a medical issue, and I couldn’t communicate my symptoms or my medical history?”
He has an obvious reason to view this language barrier through the lens of a medical professional. Ciporkin, who previously practiced general dentistry in Pennsylvania, is also a board-certified radiologist with a background in academic medicine.
“This experience inspired me to create a product that would empower the traveler by eliminating some of the vulnerability we all face and feel when traveling in a country where we don’t speak their language and they don’t speak ours,” he says.
This is how Ciporkin came to create the Global Health Passport, a paper booklet that conveys the personalized medical history of an international traveler of any age. Each passport has a “base” language of English or Spanish paired with another language: Japanese, Arabic, or Chinese. Ciporkin adds, though, that the passports, first designed in 2016, can be customized for any travel destination.
“We can provide any language that is requested by an operator for tours offered anywhere in the world,” he says.
Each passport is roughly the size of a standard passport and includes three sections: medical history, current medical status, and current dental status. In each section, the traveler simply checks the appropriate yes or no response to a series of medical and dental questions. Each response is paired with the corresponding translation of a second language so that a local medical or dental professional can quickly gather vital medical information in the event of an emergency. The information can also be used in other scenarios, such as when a traveler wishes to share details about a food allergy with a restaurant server.