Blogs

Create a Post 

Inclusive by Design: How Digital Tools Are Shaping the Future of Health Communication

By IHA Staff posted 21 days ago
Inclusive by Design: How Digital Tools Are Shaping the Future of Health Communication By: Diana Peña Gonzalez, MPH, MCHES At this year’s conference, digital innovation took center stage as leaders explored a vital question: How can we design the future of health communication to be more inclusive, more human, and more equitable from the start? From visionary keynote speakers to hands-on sessions, three critical voices mapped out that future in powerful ways. Here are my top takeaways, along with new questions they inspired. 1. “Technology is the fastest, most scalable path to health equity.” —Jessica Brooks Woods Jessica Brooks Woods emphasized ...

Healthcare Literacy in Schools: An Opportunity to Address the U.S. Healthcare Crisis

By IHA Staff posted 03-28-2025
Healthcare Literacy in Schools: An Opportunity to Address the U.S. Healthcare Crisis By Fred Garner, MD, FAAP The U.S. healthcare system is in crisis. Among industrialized countries, the United States ranks low for patient outcomes and satisfaction and high in costs. Many Americans struggle to choose, navigate, and cost-effectively utilize healthcare. One of the most effective ways to address these challenges is to integrate healthcare literacy into school curricula. This approach can significantly improve patient outcomes and satisfaction and reduce individual and overall healthcare costs. Why Schools Must Teach Healthcare Literacy Healthcare ...

Harnessing the Power of AI to Create Theory-Driven Health Literacy Resources

By IHA Staff posted 03-05-2025
Harnessing the Power of AI to Create Theory-Driven Health Literacy Resources By Ayo Olagoke, PhD, MPH Health literacy plays a crucial role in empowering individuals to access, understand, and apply health information to make informed decisions about their health and well-being. But achieving this goal is no small task. Diffe rent communities require tailored resources that cater to their unique needs, and designing these resources involves drawing on proven frameworks and theories. While theories are essential for guiding and predicting outcomes, creating health literacy materials that are grounded in theory can be ...

Disaster Readiness and Health Literacy

By IHA Staff posted 02-18-2025
Disaster Readiness and Health Literacy By Rima E. Rudd, Sc.D. During this last year, every region of our country has faced at least one natural disaster related to fire or ice, heat or cold, winds or high waters, infectious disease, or cybersecurity. For many of our communities, consequences were dire, and homes, health, work, and security were compromised. Public Health and Disaster Planning and Management Public health focuses on the duty to protect and promote the well-being and health of the public. This mission includes a responsibility for research, for advance planning, for informing people of threats to health and safety, ...

Improving Communication: How Pediatricians Can Support Non-English-Speaking Parents

By IHA Staff posted 02-03-2025
Improving Communication: How Pediatricians Can Support Non-English-Speaking Parents By Abigail Preston Many individuals experience feelings of fear or anxiety when going to the doctor. They may find healthcare settings scary due to not understanding what is happening, or not knowing what providers will do. Imagine going to see a healthcare provider who does not speak your own language. Having someone speak to you quickly about unfamiliar topics can lead to no understanding at all and make you more confused than when you came in. More than 25 million individuals in the United States do not speak English, leading to a huge communication ...

Making Free Health Clinics More Accessible

By IHA Staff posted 11-12-2024
Making Free Health Clinics More Accessible Free clinics have a massive potential to serve the healthcare needs of uninsured and underinsured individuals. But there’s a major issue that needs to be solved. By Reyhan Haider Free clinics have the potential to be a lifeline for the over 26 million uninsured and millions more underinsured individuals in the U.S. Yet, despite their importance, these clinics are often underutilized . One of the critical reasons for this is the pervasive lack of health literacy. Knowing how to navigate the healthcare system—where to find care, understanding basic health concepts, and making informed decisions—is ...

Shaping a Health Literate Organization

By IHA Staff posted 10-21-2024
Shaping a Health Literate Organization By Greg O’Neill , MSN, APRN, AGCNS-BC, NPD-BC, NEA-BC Stakeholder : What is it that you do here? Me : I boil the ocean, one cup at a time. As a champion of health literacy, you want to make your own organization more health literate. As we learn more about how to help patients, families, and communities understand their health and take action to improve their quality of life, a few things become clear: Becoming a health literate organization will generally be slower and more complex than we wish it was. It will require a culture change in the way all health professionals practice ...

AI Solutions Hub: Navigating the AI and Health Literacy Nexus

By IHA Staff posted 10-09-2024
AI Solutions Hub: Navigating the AI and Health Literacy Nexus By Michael Villaire, MSLM We welcome you to explore a new hub on the Institute for Healthcare Advancement (IHA) Health Literacy Solutions Center: AI Solutions Hub: Navigating the AI and Health Literacy Nexus . AI raises questions that have worked their way into the national (and international) conversation, such as: What is it? Is it dangerous? How can it help me? How can it make my work more efficient? The AI Solutions Hub aims to provide a forum for all of us to learn, share, and ask questions about ...

Design Your Website With Health Literacy in Mind

By IHA Staff posted 08-29-2024
Design Your Website With Health Literacy in Mind Tips for Creating User-Friendly, Accessible Websites for Diverse Audiences An Interview With Christi Williford , BFA, and Elena Haskins , BS When someone goes to your website to learn about your organization, access your services, or get actionable healthcare information, can they find what they need — and can they understand it? Or do they struggle through cluttered layouts and confusing navigation hierarchies? Are they confronted with large, dense blocks of text full of medical jargon? Do they click around in a vain search for vital health information? In other words, is ...

How to Plan for Health Literacy Month

By IHA Staff posted 08-02-2024
How to Plan for Health Literacy Month Get Ideas and Insights for Your Organization by Learning from Penn Medicine By Carolyn Cutilli, PhD, RN, NPD-BC At Penn Medicine, we celebrate Health Literacy Month each year in October by hosting educational events and activities that increase patient and staff awareness. Over the past decade, our Health Literacy Month celebration has grown from individual hospital events presented by staff to system-wide activities including national speakers. As a patient education specialist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, I work with a team of staff and patients at the health system level as well as ...

How to Write and Evaluate Health Questionnaires, Surveys, and Forms

By IHA Staff posted 06-03-2024
How to Write and Evaluate Health Questionnaires, Surveys, and Forms Get the Data You Need by Creating and Assessing Questionnaires with Health Literacy in Mind By Katie Leath, MPH, MA In this Blog: Why questionnaires need different assessments How to create better questionnaires, surveys, and forms Improving survey results by focusing on health literacy Think of the last time you gave a patient, community member, or study participant something to fill out. Maybe it was a questionnaire for public health surveillance or a research study, or perhaps you were collecting patient-reported outcomes or intake paperwork and ...

AI and Health Literacy  4 Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss at the 2024 IHA Conference

By IHA Staff posted 05-03-2024
AI and Health Literacy 4 Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss at the 2024 IHA Conference By Diana Gonzalez, MPH, MCHES Across virtually every industry — including healthcare and health communications — it’s hard to find a tech innovation as impactful as artificial intelligence (AI). Whatever your role in communicating with patients, the public, or others in the healthcare environment, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, and more seem to promise to make your work easier and more productive. Of course, crafting health-literate communications is not as straightforward as typing a prompt into an AI app. When producing communication ...

Healthcare Communications, AI Policies, and You

By IHA Staff posted 04-23-2024
Healthcare Communications, AI Policies, and You Health Literacy Specialists Should Be Part of AI Policy Planning By Tracy Mehan, AI Subject Matter Expert I was recently asked to give a talk about what healthcare organizations should consider when developing policies around employee use of programs that utilize artificial intelligence (AI). To prepare, I researched who is typically involved in creating these policies and what factors organizations weigh as they develop them. What I found is that, typically, the people in the room where decisions are being made are members of the C-suite and IT. That’s it. Who does this leave out? The frontline ...

Healthcare Communications, AI Policies, and You

By IHA Staff posted 04-23-2024
Healthcare Communications, AI Policies, and You Health Literacy Specialists Should Be Part of AI Policy Planning By Tracy Mehan, AI Subject Matter Expert I was recently asked to give a talk about what healthcare organizations should consider when developing policies around employee use of programs that utilize artificial intelligence (AI). To prepare, I researched who is typically involved in creating these policies and what factors organizations weigh as they develop them. What I found is that, typically, the people in the room where decisions are being made are members of the C-suite and IT. That’s it. Who does this leave out? The frontline ...

Q&A: The Health Literacy Collaborative Summit

By IHA Staff posted 03-15-2024
Q&A: The Health Literacy Collaborative Summit IHA’s Stan Hudson talks with Wisconsin Literacy’s Michele Erikson about the organization’s next-generation event. By Stan Hudson, MA, CDFT Health literacy is a constantly changing and expanding field, and the same is true of the organizations and events that support its evolution. As the new director of professional development and training for the Institute for Healthcare Advancement (IHA) — and the former director of health literacy at Wisconsin Literacy — I’ve had the privilege of participating in this change and working with some of health literacy’s brightest lights. ...

The Health Fluency Project

By IHA Staff posted 03-01-2024
The Health Fluency Project How two Harvard students are increasing the health literacy and communication skills of non-native English speakers to improve health outcomes By Beier Nelson Student, Harvard College and Aditya Tummala Student, Harvard College More than 25 million people in the United States, or 8 percent of the nation’s population, have limited English proficiency ( LEP ), meaning that they do not speak English as their primary language and have a limited ability to read, write, speak, and understand English. Individuals with such language barriers suffer substantially worse health outcomes than their fluent counterparts, including ...

What Is Cultural Humility, and How Does It Support Health Literacy?

By IHA Staff posted 01-31-2024
What Is Cultural Humility, and How Does It Support Health Literacy? By Annaleise Tripp , MPH Candidate Do you ever think about what makes people different and stand out from each other? You might think about someone’s haircut or outfit, the language they speak, their accent, or maybe where they live and work. These can all be reflections of someone’s cultural background. Our lives are shaped by culture . Culture refers to shared beliefs, values, and ideas, but also refers to shared racial or ethnic backgrounds, languages and communication, geographic locations, or traditions and customs. Culture plays a significant role in how ...

LLM 4: Will Large Language Models Ever Really Be Trustworthy Enough for Health Literacy?

By IHA Staff posted 12-06-2023
Explained: AI + Health Literacy Will Large Language Models Ever Really Be Trustworthy Enough for Health Literacy? An Artificial Intelligence Practitioner’s Perspective on Trustworthiness and Responsibility, Part 4 By Temese Szalai | December 7, 2023 Read more in the series: Part 1 | Can — and Should — We Trust Large Language Models for Health Literacy? | Publish Date: November 28, 2023 Part 2 | How Reliable Are Large Language Models for Health Literacy? | Publish Date: November 30, 2023 Part 3 | When LLMs May Not Be Appropriate for Health Literacy | Publish Date: December 5, 2023 In our last post in this series, ...

LLM 3: When Large Language Models May Not Be Appropriate for Health Literacy

By IHA Staff posted 12-04-2023
Explained: AI + Health Literacy When Large Language Models May Not Be Appropriate for Health Literacy An Artificial Intelligence Practitioner’s Perspective on Trustworthiness and Responsibility, Part 3 By Temese Szalai | December 5, 2023 Read more in the series: Part 1 | Can — and Should — We Trust Large Language Models for Health Literacy? | Publish Date: November 28, 2023 Part 2 | How Reliable Are Large Language Models for Health Literacy? | Publish Date: November 30, 2023 Part 4 | Will LLMs Ever Really Be Trustworthy Enough for Health Literacy? | Publish Date: December 7, 2023 This post is the third in a series ...

LLM 2: How Reliable Are Large Language Models for Health Literacy?

By IHA Staff posted 11-30-2023
Explained: AI + Health Literacy How Reliable Are Large Language Models for Health Literacy? An Artificial Intelligence Practitioner’s Perspective on Trustworthiness and Responsibility, Part 2 By Temese Szalai | November 30, 2023 Read more in the series: Part 1 | Can — and Should — We Trust Large Language Models for Health Literacy? | Publish Date: November 28, 2023 Part 3 | When LLMs May Not Be Appropriate for Health Literacy | Publish Date: December 5, 2023 Part 4 | Will LLMs Ever Really Be Trustworthy Enough for Health Literacy? | Publish Date: December 7, 2023 Today, we’ll continue our discussion of trustworthiness ...