Designing Digital Health for Every Language: Embedding Equity Into Virtual Care 

Language access isn’t a “nice to have” in healthcare. It’s the difference between confusion and clarity, between delay and diagnosis. In this episode, Carolina Daza, Senior Virtual Health Specialist at Corewell Health, shares how her journey from healthcare interpreter to digital health leader has shaped a multi-year push to embed language access directly into virtual care platforms across Michigan. 

For more than a decade, Carolina Daza has worked at the intersection of interpretation, patient advocacy, and telemedicine. Starting her career as a healthcare interpreter, she witnessed firsthand how vulnerable patients feel when they can’t fully understand what’s happening in a clinical setting. That experience now fuels her work inside Corewell Health’s virtual care ecosystem. 

In this conversation, Carolina explains why language access in digital health must go far beyond translation. It means designing simple patient journeys, integrating interpreters directly into telemedicine platforms, and ensuring consistent, seamless access across video visits, patient portals, and remote care programs. She shares the behind-the-scenes reality of pushing for system-wide integration — navigating approvals, aligning technical teams, coordinating multiple vendors, and even restarting years of work when the system switched language access partners. 

Most powerfully, Carolina describes the moment a clinician told her how a newly integrated “interpreter button” made it possible to finally reach a patient who had been unreachable for months. For her, that single story mattered as much as any metric. The takeaway: language access isn’t an add-on. It must be built into digital health from day one — as a shared responsibility across clinical, IT, and patient experience teams. 

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Meet Carolina Daza

Carolina Daza, Senior Virtual Health Specialist at Corewell Health in West Michigan, brings more than 20 years of healthcare expertise—and plenty of heart—to everything she does. 

Born in Chile and proudly Latina, Carolina moved to the United States in the early 90s, where her curiosity, resilience, and passion for helping others took root. Today, she blends her cultural perspective and deep experience to make healthcare more accessible. 

Since joining the Virtual Health team in 2015, Carolina has been a driving force behind the growth of telemedicine across West Michigan. She has successfully launched numerous outpatient virtual clinics, making it easier than ever for patients to get the care they need when they need it. Over the years, Carolina has partnered with multiple teams, departments, and clinical specialties across Corewell Health to establish consistent, high-quality care via telemedicine—ensuring providers and patients alike experience seamless virtual workflows. 

Carolina also played a key role in integrating TytoCare across Corewell Health West and has spent the last five years implementing innovative virtual health programs with both internal teams and employer partners across Michigan—delivering outstanding results and transforming the way care is delivered. In addition to her program leadership, she continues to take on critical operational roles in launching and optimizing new digital and virtual-care platforms across Corewell Health, helping drive systemwide innovation and adoption. 

With a blend of expertise, compassion, and unstoppable energy, Carolina continues to bridge the gap between patients and the often-complex world of healthcare—one virtual visit at a time.