Digital health literacy is one of the goals of Healthy People 2020 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010), since approximately eight million American use the internet daily to research health-related topics (Eltorai, Ghanian, Adams, Born & Daniels, 2014). Patients with chronic disease are more likely to obtain information from websites (Rew, Saenz, & Walker, 2018). One concern is that unreliable websites may provide incorrect information to patients. Another concern is that the average readability of some consumer patient education websites is at 10.9, which exceeds the recommended sixth grade reading level (Bedaiwi, Alfaraj, & Pines, 2018).
This describes a learning activity in a graduate nursing program for a Patient Education and Advocacy course. Students analyzed national healthcare websites for readability, design, layout, cultural sensitivity, and appropriateness for a rural, low-health literacy population. Students obtained increased awareness of the issues of readability and appropriateness of information on national healthcare websites, better preparing them to educate patients in digital health literacy.
A recording of this presentation is available.
Click the button to the right to access the session archive.