Summary
1. health literacy has been found to have an impact on healthcare spending. a summary of studies shows that predicted spending levels are different when the health literacy variable is set to zero or one, indicating that inadequate health literacy may increase healthcare costs.
2. Literacy practitioners and scholars have noted that many individuals struggle with health literacy, particularly when dealing with complex displays of information and specialized knowledge.
3. In the International adult Literacy Survey, health literacy tasks required participants to integrate information, make high-level text-based inferences, and compare and contrast data points.
4. health literacy activities reported by participants varied in the type of information requested, plausibility of distractors, type of calculation, and operation specificity.
5. Privacy documents provided to consumers are often written above the reading level of many americans, raising concerns about understanding of federal regulations before care is provided.
6. a two-part model was proposed by Mullahy (1998) to estimate the effect of health literacy on healthcare costs, but the results from the standard two-part model are presented instead, as they were found to be within 5% of the predicted values from the modified model.
Citation
Nielsen-Bohlman, Lynn and Institute of Medicine (U.S.), eds. health Literacy: a Prescription to End Confusion. Washington, D.C: National academies Press, 2004.
