It’s a fact the world has a health literacy problem. In the United States, just 23,3% of adults have proficient health literacy. This means nearly 4 out of 5 adults lack the necessary skills to not only prevent disease but to manage their health. That results in higher rates of chronic illnesses, poor self-care, preventable hospitalizations, less frequent use of preventive services, etc. Today, having access to the Internet and high technologies, patients can improve their medical literacy and, in turn, providers can help them with that. In this article, I want to highlight:
The definition of health literacy was updated in August 2020 straight after the release of the U.S. government’s Healthy People 2030 initiative. Now it reads as: “It’s the degree to which individuals have the capacity to find, obtain, process, understand, and use basic health information and services needed to make well-informed health decisions and actions for themselves and others.”
Health literacy affects everyone every day. You can overlook the fact that low medical literacy affects the quality of your life in total, but it’s the fact. Every one of us, at some point in life, needs to be able to access, understand, and use the information and services to address a health issue correctly.
As outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, proficient medical literacy skills are important, because if they are poor, they lead to:
Nearly 90% of Americans have access to and use the Internet and about 81% own a smartphone. Evidently, today almost every American has access to the Internet and all the information available there. That’s why they are better informed. However, there is a huge downside to consider. Doing research, people can get confused if they don’t have enough knowledge about their illness/treatment/symptoms.
Thus, the low literacy level of the patients combined with heaps of conflicting data can lead to the wrong decisions, panic, self-medicating and other problems that can affect the outcome, harm a patient’s health, and make matters worse. Thus, the education of patients plays an important role so that people are able to use the information found on the Internet properly.
With unlimited access to the internet and various gadgets, organizations have tons of opportunities for the improvement of health literacy. So, healthcare providers can utilize available technologies to enable health literacy improvement:
With that in mind, medical literacy should be an integral focal point for healthcare organizations to close gaps between delivering insights and acting on them, which will result in accelerated outcome improvement. The complete lifecycle of medical literacy consists of four core elements:
Healthcare organizations that provide care services (hospitals, rehab centers, providers of wearables or mHealth apps, etc.) should invest in an integrative baseline architecture in which data starts to come together into one place. That enables users (patients and clinicians) to start utilizing data more efficiently.
For traditional settings, it can be instructions shared with a patient on the upcoming treatment or lab experience. It can be support for in-house patients, telling how surgery rehab goes; it can be a post-discharge pack of info and many more. In the United States, discharge programs include pre-recorded educational videos and materials that can be shared with relatives to help them interpret symptoms and suggest possible actions and alarm signs. In addition to this type of information on a patient portal, the doctor can record a short session of the last visit that has person-specific notes and recommendations.
For all types of innovative solutions, such as VR and HC devices, they can bring tons of value, from simple user guidance explaining the science behind the whole thing to individual specific programs and advice on supplementary services.
Data solutions can provide the most relevant instructions and information exactly when it is needed: before the admission or outpatient visit until discharge and throughout the ongoing supportive health care. It’s because they support the utilization of high-quality data to drive insights with confidence. What’s more, various tools integrated help organizations gather, process, and analyze the data to measure the current level of patients’ literacy and then develop the strategy of improvement.
Here is a sample of how the data solutions can improve medical literacy that includes:
Still, patients can face health literacy issues because they:
That’s why by implementing the high technologies and data solutions, healthcare providers can improve health literacy among patient populations by:
A poor medical literacy level can have various negative effects on a patient’s health and the care that they receive. So, improvement of health literacy can help patients:
Data can help you deliver the right information in the right format to the right person. It helps you understand what works and what does not in a patient literacy program. It’s not only about doing surveys with patients, but also analysis of how the shared materials are used and how the usage correlates with the care outcomes. When it comes to healthcare organizations, improvement of the patients’ medical literacy will decrease the rates of admission and inefficient use of specialized hospital services that are designed for more critical patient care, because people will utilize preventative health services. And, as a result, it will lead to reduced healthcare costs.
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