Chances are that some of your patients are among the tens of millions of individuals in the United States who may have difficulty understanding and acting on health information. Are any of these individuals in your practice? Here is how you can find out.
What is the Prevalence Calculator?
The Prevalence Calculator is a tool that provides a rough estimate of the percentage of patients in your practice that may have particular difficulty understanding medical information and instructions. Specifically, the calculator estimates the percentage of your patients that might have limited health literacy. Health literacy is the ability to read, understand, and act on medical instructions and information.
Data for the Prevalence Calculator were drawn from the results from the health literacy component of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), published by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2006, and supplemented by other reports in medical literature. The calculator uses a simple formula that takes into account demographic characteristics of patients in your practice, and multiplies each demographic variable by a factor, derived from NAAL and other sources, to determine the percentage of your patients that may have limited literacy skills.
Note that the prevalence calculator is not a tool for determining whether an individual patient has limited literacy skills. Rather, it is for use in assessing your overall practice, to provide an estimate of the percentage of your patients who might have difficulty understanding your instructions and other health information.
Why is the Prevalence Calculator important?
The NAAL tested a random sample of more than 19,000 American adults to assess their skills at reading and understanding prose, documents, and basic computations related to health care information. The result indicated more than a third of American adults have health literacy skills at only a basic or below basic level. These individuals have difficultly reading and interpreting frequently encountered health-related text and documents, as well as difficulty performing everyday mathematical tasks, even when a calculator is available to them.
Many of these individuals have difficulty understanding their physicians' advice, reading medication labels, or understanding how to complete insurance forms and other paperwork to get the medical or financial assistance that is available to them. These individuals, many of whom are your patients, come from all walks of life and from all ethnic groups and backgrounds.
Research has shown that limited health literacy is associated with adverse health outcomes, high health care costs, and needless emergency department visits. As a result, the need to provide clear health communication has moved to the forefront.
After using the calculator to determine that some of your patients may have limited health literacy, you can use a number of tools to assist you in communicating more effectively with patients. In fact, these communication tools can be used to improve communication with ALL patients, not just those with limited literacy skills.
Where can I get the Prevalence Calculator?
The Prevalence Calculator is available below, at no cost.
What can be done with the results?
For health care providers who have identified the need to improve their communication with patients, Pfizer Inc and its partners have created a broad range of tools. These tools will assist in communicating with patients in a manner that is attuned to their level of understanding and their culture. These tools can be found on the Internet at www.npsf.org/askme3 or www.clearhealthcommunication.org.
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