Piecing Together Your Health: One Letter at a time

Health Literacy
According to Healthy People 2010 health literacy is defined as "The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions." (To read to entirety of Healthy People 2010 please visit [http://www.healthypeople.gov/Document/pdf/uih/2010uih.pdf])
Health Literacy Month is celebrated during all of October and is a time for promotional and educational campaigns.



Health literacy includes a variety of topics including, navigating health care systems, understanding your health insurance, knowing how to locate important health information, understanding your prescription drugs, understanding appointments slips and consent forms, and much more. Generally, the average person in American cannot perform one or more of these tasks. There are a few different ways that health literacy is measured including: Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) reading subtest (which is not specific to health topics but literacy in general), Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM), and Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (TOFHLA).
Anyone can be at risk of having poor health literacy, but in general it affects the young, old, and those with low education level the most. In turn, those with low health literacy report poorer health status. They generally incur higher health care costs because they frequent their physician in part because of this low health literacy. The 2003 Assessment of Adult Literacy suggests that this lack of health literacy costs $106-238 billion a year. A study done by the National Academy on Aging Society estimated the costs at about $73 billion in 1998.
One of the largest contributors to having poor health literacy is the complexity of the health care system in the United States. The health care systems in the United States are made more complex when people do not understand how to navigate through them. Common barriers that people are stopped by include: evaluating physicians, evaluating hospitals, communicating with physicians, understanding Medicare and Medicaid, obtaining and understanding insurance, accessing information about a diagnosis, making a plan for the end of life, and privacy rights.