Clinical resources

Health literacy information & resources

Understanding the health literacy level of your patients helps achieve better treatment outcomes.

Health literacy is a patient's ability to understand written and verbal health information well enough to make appropriate health care decisions.

Many intelligent people have low health literacy; age, cultural background, income and education do not indicate that a patient is health literate.

Providers need to be able to gauge their patients' health literacy to ensure that all diagnoses, treatments and medication plans are understood.

Low health literacy can cause misuse of medications or treatments and other problems, creating devastating health outcomes.
The costs associated with low health literacy are staggering. According to the Institute of Medicine, the American health care system estimates $993 per patient in unnecessary expenses could have been avoided with improved communications.

Health literary resources
Practice management
	American Medical Association Health Literacy Kit Learn to recognize low health literacy in your patients and help them understand your diagnoses, treatment options, and treatment instructions.
	Institute for Healthcare Advancement (IHA) Health Literacy Rewrite/Redesign Service Are your patient materials understandable and readable? Are they designed to help your patients use them? This service can help.
	The Ask Me 3^TM program from the National Patient Safety Foundation This program helps patients by encouraging them to ask their health care providers three questions: 1. What is my main problem? 2. What do I need to do? 3. Why is it important for me to do this?
Patient education
	Pill guide (40KB PDF) Fill out this schedule to help your patients remember when to take their medications. Added 12/2009.
	The Ask Me 3^TM doctor visit worksheet from the National Patient Safety Foundation This worksheet reminds patients to ask their health care providers the Ask me 3 questions, and gives them space to write down what they need to remember.

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Last modified: 5/25/2011