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 how to equip health organizations and professionals to communicate more clearly. I am not as into increasing people's personal health literacy skills. With only so many hours in the day, 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
I publish peer-reviewed jopurnal articles to share knowledge about health literacy:
In my dissertation, I test out what happens when we use supervised learning and large language models to helps us automate the CDC Clear Communication 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: