Health Literacy Foundations: Your Starting Point

New to health communication? We're here to help. This curated collection is your perfect starting point, offering essential knowledge, tools, and expert guidance to kickstart your journey.

Health Literacy 101

Michael Villaire, MSLM, President/CEO at the Institute for Healthcare Advancement, presents an overview of the scope of low health literacy, including frequencies among the general population, general characteristics, abilities and challenges of persons with low health literacy, and the cost of poor health literacy (both in terms of human suffering and dollars). The video is a session recording from the 2021 IHA Health Literacy Conference.

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Articles

Lessons From IHA’s Health Literacy Conference 2025

Click here to explore expert advice on navigating politicized health topics, featuring insights from Katy Evans, PhD, at IHA’s 2025 Health Literacy Conference.

More to come...

White Papers

IHA presents these in-depth white papers to help healthcare professionals integrate health literacy into their organizational practices. See them here.

New! Benefits of Health Literacy in Written Communication

This white paper shows how plain language and clear design in health materials improve understanding, decision-making, satisfaction, and treatment adherence. It stresses the need to assess materials for real-world usability using health literacy standards to help organizations create user-centered communication that builds trust, improves outcomes, and supports health equity. See here.

Health Literacy Training: A Solution for Addressing Workforce Challenges

This paper shows how health literacy training can help healthcare organizations respond to workforce shortages and reimbursement challenges. By improving staff communication and patient understanding, organizations can boost retention, satisfaction, and financial outcomes. See here.

Marketing and Communication - The Role of Health Literacy in Building Patient Trust: A Guide for Healthcare Marketers and Communicators

Targeted at healthcare marketers and communicators, this paper shows how health literacy improves patient trust, engagement, and loyalty. It offers strategies for using plain language, cultural relevance, and digital tools to deliver clear, accessible, and trustworthy messages. See here.

Health Literacy – A Bridge to Health Equity

Health literacy is a critical tool for closing health disparities and advancing equity across healthcare systems. This white paper outlines how organizational practices—like clear communication, language access, and inclusive messaging—can support equitable care for all populations. See here.

Health Literacy for Nurses - Providing Health Literate Care

This white paper highlights how nurses can improve patient outcomes, reduce readmissions, and lower malpractice risk by integrating health literacy practices into daily care. It includes actionable strategies like teach-back and shared decision-making to ensure clear, patient-centered communication. See here.

Becoming a Health Literate Organization- The Business Case

This white paper presents the case for why becoming a health literate organization benefits patients and the bottom line. It outlines practical steps and measurable benefits—like improved patient experience, fewer errors, and higher value-based reimbursement. See here.

Most Watched Webinars

Always Use Teach-Back!

Mary Ann Abrams, M.D., M.P.H.

This interactive webinar will focus on the teach-back method, including how it incorporates health literacy principles, and what resources are available to help you implement the practice. Teach-back involves checking for understanding by asking patients to state in their own words what they need to know or do about their health. It is not a test of the patient’s knowledge, but a way to confirm that you have explained things in a manner the patient understands.

Tell Me in Your Own Words: Bringing Teach Back to Life in a Health System

Greg O’Neil, MSN, APRN, AGCNS-BC, NPD-BC

What does it look like to weave Teach-Back into the culture of a health system? At Christiana Care, we put our four-year journey into hyperdrive with a special partnership between the Patient & Family Health Education and the Patient Experience Teams. In alignment with the national standards from Always Use Teach-Back, we created promotional materials, special training sessions, awareness campaigns, added a teach-back question to our experience surveys system-wide, and embedded teach-back into the organization's annual operating goals. Come find out how to set up a sustainable program impacting all disciplines and settings in your organization!

Health Literacy - Component of Risk Communication

Marti Lindsey, PhD
Ben Richmond

This webinar describes Health Literacy as an essential component of Risk Communication.  We will describe twelve features of environmental health literacy, which promote action on risk communication messages and stress how a person can protect themselves, their family and their community. Important topics to be discussed are understanding the health literacy levels of your audience, applying that understanding to developing messages, the issue of risk perception and the importance of using Plain Language in developing those messages. The concepts will be discussed in the context of a protocol for developing risk communication messages based on research conducted over the past three years.

More Learning Opportunities: Virtual Trainings

There are a number of resources on online health literacy training. To help, we’ve put together a collection of resources on this topic. The collection includes a brief description of each resource.

Health Literacy for Public Health Professionals

This introductory web-based course—available for free through CDC Train—aims to educate public health professionals (such as physicians, registered nurses, and dentists) about public health literacy and their role in providing health information and services and promoting public health literacy. This course provides continuing education and a certificate of completion. By clicking the link below, you will be leaving the Health Literacy Solutions Center and taken to an outside website.

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Fundamentals of Communicating Health Risk

This intermediate web-based course—available for free through CDC Train—aims to help public health communicators (such as educators, clinicians, and media specialists) improve or learn new communication skills for conveying everyday public health risks to the public. This course provides a certificate of completion. It does not provide continuing education. By clicking the link below, you will be leaving the Health Literacy Solutions Center and taken to an outside website.

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Effective Communication for Healthcare Teams: Addressing Health Literacy, Limited English Proficiency, and Cultural Differences

This web-based course—available for free through CDC Train—has 4 modules (some introductory, some intermediate). It aims to improve the quality of interaction between healthcare professionals and patients by providing an interactive guide to understanding health literacy, cultural competency, and limited English proficiency. This course provides continuing education and a certificate of completion. By clicking the link below, you will be leaving the Health Literacy Solutions Center and taken to an outside website.

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Always Use Teach-back Toolkit Interactive Learning Module

This learning module—part of the Always Use Teach-back Toolkit—is available for free through the Institute for Healthcare Advancement. It describes teach-back and demonstrates its effectiveness as a health literacy intervention to improve patient-provider communication by allowing healthcare providers to identify and practice key aspects of teach-back. This module does not provide continuing education or a certificate of completion. By clicking the link below, you will be leaving the Health Literacy Solutions Center and taken to an outside website.

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IHA Health Literacy Academy

Elevate your career and make a lasting difference in healthcare with IHA's Health Literacy Academy. No matter your background or location, you'll learn to break down communication barriers and acquire digital skills, empowering you to promote health literacy and equity for everyone you serve.

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