The Institute for Healthcare Advancement (IHA), a non-profit with the mission of helping individuals obtain and understand the health care information they need, found that some healthcare organizations were having trouble getting started with implementing effective, scalable health literacy solutions. But two months ago they released the AI-based HealthLiteracyCopilot, developed through a partnership with HealthcareGPS, to make health literacy scalable and available to all.
Michael Villaire, Chief Executive Officer at IHA, says that in the United States, only one in ten people has the skills and ability to get the information that helps them manage their conditions—which includes getting resources, managing treatments, and reducing costs. Health literacy means “the ability of individuals to understand, find, and apply healthcare information in a way that’s meaningful for them.”
Stan Hudson, Director of Professional Development and Training at IHA, says that their focus has evolved from empowering the individual to training organizations to support those individuals and provide the tools they need.
A huge range of organizations need to provide health literacy. IHA’s current clients include the obvious ones: providers, pharma (and its marketing branches), and payers. But IHA also wants to aid public health agencies, social service workers connecting clients to health care, benefits managers designing wellness programs—anyone who touches health care. Villaire refers to “health equity” as their goal.
How does AI help health literacy become more widely available? Fred Camacho, Founder and CEO at HealthcareGPS, lays out some of the requirements for customization it can help with. Many different organizations, even within a single company, might need to adapt documents to different “personas” or types of users. Different glossaries are often needed, but voice and tone also should be adjustable. Regulatory requirements can also constrain documents. AI can also test whether a document is appropriate for a particular persona.
The basic workflow for using HealthLiteracyCopilot is: upload a document, let it evaluate its readability, design, and other metrics built into the tool, act on the tool’s suggestions by accepting, rejecting or rewriting, then export the document. The tool can also translate a document into 40 languages.
Hudson says that readability goes beyond standard metrics for reading level to include the document design, aimed at “reducing that cognitive load on the reader.” A poorly designed document won’t be read in the first place. This one example of why it’s not sufficient to generate or evaluate a document’s health literacy using a generic LLM like ChatGPT. HealthLiteracyCopilot is built upon proprietary health literacy standards for document design, usability, and readability, which go well beyond anything a generic LLM can do.
Going beyond evaluating documents for health literacy, HealthLiteracyCopilot also lets an organization generate a new document from reliable sources. The tool provides the necessary scalability to handle the thousands of documents used by some clients. The tool is hosted in AWS and is SOC2 and HIPAA-compliant.
Villaire says that IHA is partnering with philanthropic organizations to provide the tool to smaller organizations, particularly in rural areas. They have additional products to support the integration of health literacy into an organization’s workflows. They also provide conferences and other educational opportunities.
Check out our interview with Institute for Healthcare Advancement (IHA) and HealthcareGPS to learn more about health literacy and specifically a new health literacy AI tool called HealthLiteracyCopilot.
Learn more about IHA: https://www.iha4health.org/
Learn more about HealthcareGPS: https://healthcaregps.ai/
Learn more about HealthLiteracyCopiloty: https://healthliteracycopilot.ai/
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