For the last 20 years, October has been recognized as Health Literacy Month. While the healthcare industry has made strides to improve awareness and close gaps in care due to low health literacy, there is still much work to do.
Amplified as a priority for Healthy People 2030, the nation’s 10 year plan to address critical health issues, the definition of health literacy shifted focus from understanding health information to understanding and using health information. Healthy People defines personal health literacy as the “degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.” Organizational health literacy is also part of the plan to ensure healthcare organizations “equitably enable patients to find, understand and use healthcare information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.”
The Center for Health Care Strategies, Inc. (CHCH) estimates that 36% of adults in the United States have low health literacy. When considering the downstream impact of low health literacy, including medication errors, increased preventable emergency room visits, poor management of chronic conditions, avoidable readmissions, extended hospital stays, and more, it is estimated that low health literacy costs the US economy more than 200 billion dollars each year.
Ultimately, low health literacy must be recognized as a patient safety issue. Countless examples pervade our healthcare system, such as medication omissions and duplications, lack of treatment plan adherence, and avoidance of accessing care due to language and cultural barriers. Assessing comprehension is paramount to ensure patient safety. Clinicians often rely on ‘teach-back’ to evaluate gaps in understanding. Teach-back helps clinicians know if they have explained information and instructions clearly or if more education is needed.
Conversely, according to Fleary & Ettienne, 2018, improving health literacy contributes to enhanced utilization of preventative services, adherence to care plans, and increased shared-decision making.
Mytonomy’s content aligns with the goals of Healthy People 2030 by encouraging patient engagement and shared decision-making, supporting clear communication from care teams to patients, and helping people make informed decisions to achieve their health goals. Our patient education is built on microlearning science principles, breaking down complex topics into short, easy-to-understand segments to engage patients and convey crucial medical information in a way people retain. Our content contains supportive, empowering words using plain, respectful, inclusive language to promote shared decision-making.
Health literacy is the sum of many components of literacy, including cultural and conceptual knowledge and oral and print literacy. (IOM, 2004). Our education content is consistently developed with this in mind. Consideration of cultural representation is embedded throughout all phases of content creation to ensure patients relate to the content and feel empowered.
Improving Health Literacy is mission-critical, and we all have a part to play. Many organizations have taken great strides to meet the needs of their patients and close gaps in care due to low health literacy. However, safety issues still need to be addressed. Mytonomy welcomes the opportunity to partner to improve the healthy literacy of your patients with an education and engagement platform designed to empower and activate people across their care journey.
References:
Institute for Healthcare Advancement
https://healthliteracymonth.org/hlm/hlm-home
National Library of Medicine
Fleary, S. A., & Ettienne, R. (2019). Social Disparities in Health Literacy in the United States. Health literacy research and practice, 3(1), e47–e52. https://doi.org/10.3928/24748307-20190131-0
Institute of Medicine. 2004. Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion.
Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10883.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/download/10883
Healthy People 2030 https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/health-literacy-healthy-people-2030
Center for Health Care Strategies, Inc. (CHCH) https://www.chcs.org/resource/health-literacy-fact-sheets/
