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More than half of all adults worldwide
struggle to get the health information they need, understand what they receive, and make decisions about care for themselves and their family.
Barriers to clear communication exist
everywhere, every day and can affect every person no matter their professional, level of education, and can affect every aspect of health and wellbeing.
Health literacy can actually save lives
when the strategies are grounded in evidence, and developed using human-centered design — making them effective, efficient, and engaging.
Welcome to
Health literacy 101
Health care can be confusing for all of us.
Health literacy provides a framework to guide both health care professionals and community members to use health information and make informed decisions about their own, their family’s, their community’s, their nation’s, and the world’s health and wellbeing.
Defining health literacy
Most early definitions of health literacy proposed that it was a set of skills people lacked and placed the burden of understanding complicated health information on them alone. This approach, which is still active today, assumes that healthcare professionals are fully equipped with health literacy skills.
Today, it’s increasingly accepted that health literacy is not a set of skills that people may or may not have and is instead a multidimensional concept influenced by how healthcare systems operate, how healthcare professionals share information, and how patients understand information.
At HLM we believe that health literacy plays an important role in every aspect of health and wellbeing. We know that health literacy ranges from individual decisions to complex interactions with health professionals, and on to the design of health care systems, and health policies.
Our approach
Health literacy is more than replacing jargon with words everyone understands or teaching patients to ask questions of health care professionals when receiving care. HLM weaves health literacy into all our partnerships, programs, and products to help individuals and populations improve their health and to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of health information and systems. Our goal is to help individuals, communities, and nations make informed decisions about health and increase the health and well-being of all people.
Every move we make is backed by the latest evidence in health literacy, health communication, plain language, numeracy, design, public health, and health care.
Our proprietary health literacy review checklist assess 103 evidence-based principles
We prioritize audience research and testing to inform content and design
We use our combined 100+ years of diverse education and experience to create innovative work
