LitCE

LitCE works one-on-one to screen patients for social determinants of health using a short questionnaire.

Low literacy is a major issue in American society–in Philadelphia alone, up to 22% of adults do not have basic literacy skills. In order to meet the needs of patients with low literacy, the healthcare system should communicate relevant health information in ways that patients are able to understand. At the moment, we still lack widely adopted standard protocols for helping these patients.

Utilizing an iterative design process, we created a health literacy screening tool focused on COVID-19 and created teach-back tools to help strengthen patients’ understanding of the testing site discharge paperwork. We then called a group of 80 patients using this new protocol as a small pilot study and used the qualitative data we received from 16 patients who completed full screenings to adjust our protocol.