AHRQ adds health literacy questions to CAHPS data set

The Agency for Research and Healthcare Quality (AHRQ) has released a set of 29 questions to be added to the CAHPS (Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) Clinician and Group Survey that address health literacy. The set of questions was created in conjunction with Healthy People 2010, a national health promotion and disease prevention initiative.  The questions touch on the following topics:

• Communication with doctors
• Communication about health problems and concerns
• Communication about medicines
• Communication about tests
• Communication about forms
• Disease self-management

Research shows that only 12% of adults are fully health literate. The AHRQ’s definition of health literacy  is “patients’ ability to obtain, process, and understand the basic health information and services they need to make appropriate health decisions.” In recent years there’s been a greater push to make it the part of the physician’s and clinical team’s responsibility to educate patients about their health issues. The questions were designed as an assessment tool to help clinicians measure if their efforts are paying off and patients are in fact becoming more health literate, and it was also designed to be a quality improvement tool.

To find the set of health literacy CAHPS questions, and more about them, click here. Do you think your facility would add these health literacy questions to its existing set of CAHPS questions?