Other side of the coin: Defining "health literate healthcare organizations”

Health literacy research has focused on characterizing patients' deficits, how best to measure a patient's health literacy, and clarifying relationships between limited health literacy and health outcomes. There is a growing appreciation, however, that health literacy is a dynamic state that represents the imbalance between (a) an individual's capacities to comprehend and apply health-related knowledge to health-related decisions and to acquire health-related skills and (b) the health literacy–related demands and attributes of the health care system. We characterize organizations that have committed to improving and reengineering themselves as “health-literate health care organizations” so as to better accommodate the communication needs of populations with limited health literacy, which reinforces the notion that the health care sector shares significant responsibility in promoting health literacy. At the request of the IOM Health Literacy Policy Roundtable, we identified 10 strategies that health care organizations can develop and implement to enable patients to access and benefit as much as possible from the range of health care services and health care entities involved in contemporary health care. This presentation attempts to advance a vision of how organizations should evolve to be more responsive to the needs of populations with limited health literacy in tangible ways, thereby improving care for all. The list of attributes and goals for health-literate health care organizations included in this paper represents our attempt to synthesize a body of knowledge and practice supported to the greatest extent possible by the state of the science in the young field of health literacy.