Hi Everyone,
Welcome to our first Guest Discussion on the new LINCS Health Literacy Community! It will be 2-Part discussion about the upcoming Health Literacy Hackathon, and how new technologies and creative ideas can be used to help facilitate better health literacy. We are excited to have as our guests Stacy Robison, Xanthi Scrimgeour, Sandy Williams Hilfiker, and the rest of the CommunicateHealth team. CommunicateHealth is a health education and communication firm specializing in improving health literacy through user-centered design.
Please start by reading the announcement below about the upcoming Health Lit Hackathon. Basically, it is a one-day creative design contest where a team of people design a piece of technology (for example an app, a website or a media campaign) that will help people to find, understand, evaluate, communicate and use health information. This is an exciting, contest-based way to push technology designers and content experts to create something useful!
This week we will talk about how technology can be applied to various health literacy goals, and then brainstorm and compile some specific challenges that may be addressed by the Hackathon teams in their efforts to design these new technologies. The idea is have us think of some common challenges, and them to design the solutions!
Our guests from CommunicateHealth will start off by telling us a bit about their experience designing health literacy tools. Please feel free to ask questions or tell us what challenges you think could be helped with a creative new tech tool!
And remember, if you need technical help using this platform, please use the "Contact Us" button at the bottom of the screen, or send an email to communitysupport@lincs.ed.gov.
I hope you will join us!
All the best,
Julie
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About the Health Literacy Hackathon:
Comments
Hi everyone and thanks for joining this conversation!
We are hosting the Health Literacy Hackathon to foster collaborative relationships between health literacy advocates, designers, innovators, and technology enthusiasts! A Hackathon is a one-day event, where people collaborate intensely to create some type of product—a piece of software, an app, a website, or some other kind of tool. We are hoping that this approach will result in tools to improve health literacy.
One of our favorite tools that we recently created to improve health literacy is “Show Me!”—a universal disaster communication tool for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH). MDPH needed a tool to help first responders communicate with individuals with functional and access needs in an emergency. This turned out to be a diverse audience that includes people with cognitive disabilities, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and folks with limited English proficiency.
The CommunicateHealth team is all about user-centered design – and this project was a perfect candidate. User-centered design involves users as co-creators in every step of the product development process.
First, we identified what needed to be communicated in an emergency. We facilitated focus groups with first responders and people with functional and access needs. As you can probably imagine, the first responders had their own communication agenda that included things like:
Folks with functional and access needs wanted to communicate things like:
Next, we worked through multiple iterations to come up with a simple set of icons that would be universally understood. We used an iterative process (test, revise, retest, and repeat) to develop the icons. We tested the icons in dyads (groups of 2) of one first responder and one person with functional or access needs. As we watched them use the icons to communicate, we could spot any issues to fix in the next iteration.
The user-centered design process requires more time and effort up front, but it pays off. In the end, you have a product that you know people can understand and use. “Show me” started out as a print booklet, but we are currently working on developing an app that users can personalize for their own community (e.g. with a picture of the school where the shelter is) or themselves (e.g. a picture of their pet).
Questions for Discussion:
Thanks!
Stacy, Xanthi, Sandy, and the rest of the CommunicateHealth team
You have asked "What kinds of tools have you seen that help improve health literacy?"
This is an approach, and a set of tools to make that approach viable, for an acute care situation when a patient has just learned that they have a long-term disease that they had never heard of, and where they need to learn how to manage the disease. The approach might be described as Universal Design because it doesn't focus on a reading disability or an assistive technology for someone with a reading disability but rather is an inquiry about one's individual learning strengths. It's simple to describe the approach's initial set of questions, more complex to implement the solutions.
The hospital staff ask the patient these questions:
1. "How do you like to learn about something new and important that is affecting your life: Do you like to read? Do you like to listen to audio files, or audio discs or tapes? Do you like to watch videos? Do you like to talk one-on-one with medical professionals or in small professional-run groups with others who have just been diagnosed with this disease, or with those who have had the disease for some time?"
2. "Do you have access to a computer? A tablet such as an ipad or an android? A smart phone with web access? A video tape or blue ray disk player? If not, would you like to borrow one of these from the (hospital, library, etc.)?"
Note, patients are _not_ asked anything about their reading level or skills, or about any disability, only about preferred ways to learn. This approach can put patients at ease.
The challenge is having good learning options easily available; the hardware and content for it, and the face-to-face learning options so these choices are substantive, well-designed and easily accessed and available for each disease. Perhaps some designers in the hackathon can come up with some solutions for patients who need to easily access up-to-date, relatively easy-to-understand information (written, audio, and video form) for a particular disease. Maybe this already exists?
David J. Rosen
djrosen123@gmail.com
One technological tool I have seen more consumer health websites offer these days I also have seen some limitations when used on more mobile technologies than a PC or laptop. I have seen how the utilization of an audio feature on a website - such as that used at familydoctor.org, kidshealth.org or diabetes.org - can enhance the comprehension of information. There are many individuals who appreciate the addition of this as they may learn best by hearing, or they may have the word knowledge without the reading skills. This tools follows the words, so that viewer and listeners can follow along as the text is read. I love this, but cannot access it on my phone WHILE viewing the text. It is an either/or situation and know there are those who would greatly benefit from being able to see and hear the content on their smart phones.
Amy SIx-Means, MLIS
Consumer Health Librarian
Hanesbrands Health Learning Center
Forsyth Medical Center
Winston-Salem, NC
I am researching HL and 3d virtual worlds such as Second Life and am in the middle of my phase 1 aanalysis. I hope to add some I site into this unique way of connecting with people and how they seek, use and understand health info and how it has influenced their physical world health behaviour and well-being (sorry written on iPad not able to edit easily :)
Hi Amy -
You bring up some really interesting points. We really appreciate the use of audio features on websites--it's a great way to make a site more engaging, and more accessible! We think about optimization between websites and mobile sites all the time--it's tough, especially with mobile technology still pretty new. At CommunicateHealth, we have a lot of federal clients and often work within federal guidelines. When writing and designing for the web we have to ensure that things are 508-compliant--or, readable by a screen reader. This can be a real challenge, the software isn't always great, and it can be frustrating when working with images and text.
What are some other challenges people have faced building or using technology to improve health literacy?
Best,
Mary Ann
Was not aware of the issue of the audio functions of the mentioned websites working only separately from the written content when viewed from smartphones. This is unfortunate since many of our families only have access to these sites from their smartphones especially our Spanish speaking families. Hope the technology advances to be able to hear the audio while viewing the text on smartphones since I agree that this can help families with low literacy learn.
Eileen Mitchell RN, MN
The Emily Center Library at Phoenix Children's Hospital
Since you are an engaged community of health literacy advocates, we are asking for your help!
Remember that the purpose of the Hackathon is to create tools that will help real people take better care of their health. One of our hopes for this discussion is to get your ideas for specific health literacy challenges that people face in these ares:
What are some situations that make it hard for people to do things? Think of yourself, your patients, your students, your mother or father or someone else you know. Think of real situations they have faced regarding their health and using information to change something. Also look at the case studies from the CommunicateHealth Hackathon announcement. (http://hackathon.communicatehealth.com/ )
Answer the question:
Please send in a vignette or situation that shows a specific health literacy challenge. We will collect these ideas to share with the Hackathon teams, who will then work on specific solutions.
Thanks!!
By the way, one of Stacy's questions was:
One way is by asking you all, who all work with some type of end-user (actually we are all end-users!) to give us your ideas on what they (we!) need!
So please help us include the users from your worlds by sharing ideas with us!
Hi everyone- if you are interested in hearing about results from the Hackathon, go to this discussion thread here: https://community.lincs.ed.gov/discussion/results-our-first-health-literacy-hackathon