COVID-19: Patient Isolation and Healthcare Literacy (or lack thereof)

Even as the economy and Montana ‘opens up,” many of those in need of healthcare, either at home or some type of healthcare facility, won’t enjoy the same level of contact and interaction with caregivers and healthcare providers as they did prior to shelter-in-placed and social distancing orders were ordered in response to the threats posed by COVID-19.

Healthcare professionals and providers are doing a terrific job by (1) working to deal with an array of the newly-imposed constraints and (2) expanding the use of telehealth. 

Through all of this, new procedures and policy must recognize the abysmal state of patient healthcare literacy and patient prescription drug literacy, in the case of the latter, particularly as it applies to opioids.

There is an abundance of literature regarding how healthcare providers assume that patients understand more than they are actually able to comprehend and apply.

In the COVID-19 environment, as constraints and the application of remote technologies advance and provider-patient relationships become more remote, we must recognize that (1) patients are still patients with limited general literacy and (2) some patients with different cultural backgrounds and diseases that adversely affect their abilities to process information.

One article defines healthcare literacy as “the extent to which individuals can obtain, process and communicate health information, and how this will subsequently influence their capacity to make appropriate health decisions.”

In the new normal, it is apparent that for the short- and intermediate-term, patients will be more ‘isolated.’ Information is emerging about the psychological effects of this isolation on vulnerable populations. We cannot afford to overlook the compounding effects of isolation on healthcare literacy. 

Making the point

Here are slides excerpted from a Power Point presentation from the Agency for Healthcare and Research Care and Quality.

While the data used is somewhat dated and has a distinct flavor for prescription medication literacy, the slides nonethless underscore the (1) low levels of healthcare literacy in the United States and (2) dire consequences of that fact.