Health Literacy
Health literacy includes someone’s skills to find and use info. It also includes the quality of messages from health organizations. It also includes health professionals’ skills to share info. I like to focus on health organizations and professionals rather than mass audiences. I think it makes more sense to target people whose job it is to discuss health.
Resources
With Harvard’s Center for Health Communication, I made many resources for online content creators. My goal was to share knowledge from marketing, web accessibility, and health literacy in usable formats. Here are a few highlights to help you:
- Use familiar numbers for more relatable content
- Design clear pages and graphics for wider impact
- Streamline your writing for more reach
I also publish a health literacy newsletter on LinkedIn.
Research
In my dissertation, I look at how researchers have used the CDC Clear Communication Index. I also test out what happens when we use supervised learning and large language models to helps us automate the CDC Index. I'll publish these studies soon. But in the mean time, I can say this: AI tools cannot replace human expertise in health communication.
Teaching
I was a Teaching Fellow for a health literacy course at Harvard. This involved helping students learn to use health literacy assessments of materials including: