Pilar Ortega Author & Editor

Pilar Ortega, MD is a board-certified Emergency Physician and Assistant Professor at the U. Illinois at Chicago, where she directs the Medical Spanish program. Dr. Ortega is Co-founder and Chair for the Medical Organization for Latino Advancement (MOLA), a non-profit professional association whose goal is to increase the number of Hispanic and bilingual physicians and to improve the health of Hispanics in the U.S. She is the author of our Spanish and the Medical Interview (2nd Ed., 2015), a textbook for providers to learn to communicate with Spanish-speaking patients. This new titles would be a cases and question companion to the textbook. Dr. Ortega is the director of the recently developed U.S. National Medical Spanish Taskforce-a group of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional leaders who are developing an evidence-based process for Medical Spanish standardization and language concordance research in medical settings. She is internationally recognized for her contributions on the topics of language concordance in health, linguistic competency assessment, and Medical Spanish education. Marco Alemán, MD is a Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine ( UNC-SOM) where in 2004 he helped start the Comprehensive Advanced Medical Program of Spanish ( CAMPOS) https://www.med.unc.edu/campos/ a program where he is the principal faculty member and director for over ten years. He trained in curriculum development in medicine at the Primary Care Faculty Development Program at Michigan State. He has created and directed many courses at the UNC-SOM. He has almost 20 years of expertise in creating clinical scenarios and assessment tools for use with Standardized patients (SPs), both in English and in Spanish. He has used SPs to educate and assess medical Spanish in learners for 13 years at UNC-SOM. He has worked with Spanish language educators to improve the teaching of medical Spanish and the evaluation tools used in CAMPOS. In addition, Dr. Alemán has collaborated with Spanish interpreters at UNC Hospitals to create a written and oral exam of medical Spanish proficiency for medical students.