Health Literacy: The electricity inside health care homes
by Michelle Roberts — November 18, 2011
The St. Louis Area Business Health Coalition held a half-day educational event for its members this week. The topic: Empowering and engaging patients.
One of the key speakers was Dr. Michael J. Barry, president of the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, a practicing primary care physician and medical director of the John D. Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital.
During his presentation, Dr. Barry called “shared decision making” between patient and health care professionals a “basic appliance in the medical home.”
A patient-centered medical home is a health care setting that relies on partnerships between patients, their doctors and the patient’s family. Care is further managed through information technology, such as electronic medical records to assure that patients get care when and where they need and want it, in the language they speak and with sensitivity to their culture.
One of HLM’s longtime partners, Stan Hudson, associate director of the Center for Health Policy at the University of Missouri, was on a panel that responded to Barry’s comments. Hudson describes himself as “a true health literacy person.” He took Barry’s analogy and ran with it.
“If shared decision-making is a basic appliance in the medical home,” Hudson said, “then health literacy is the electricity.” Hudson noted that doctor’s offices aren’t “wired” for health literacy right now.
Proving he can take an analogy to its limit, Hudson continued: “The real problem for patients is information overload. We need regulators of some sort so the patient doesn’t get shocked.”