Ensuring healthcare staff members’ ability to teach the basics of patient portal use to healthcare consumers from across all levels of linguistic competence and health literacy should permeate staff development strategies. To achieve this purpose as a health administrator, I would incorporate andragogy principles into staff training endeavors. Specifically, I would create opportunities for self-directed and experiential learning with regard to acquiring health literacy assessment skills and providing individual accommodations to low- and medium-literacy populations.
Accuracy in needs identification endeavors forms the basis of the ability to cater to various patient subgroups, which is why I would emphasize literacy level identification skills in the staff. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2019) offers the SAHL-S&E literacy assessment tool suitable for English- and Spanish-speaking populations, and I would instruct the staff on how and when to apply it for better patient education. The workforce would then be encouraged to examine the tool’s implications for practice by applying it to patients with the signs of suboptimal literacy, including an incomplete understanding of instructions adapted to an average non-professional’s vocabulary and knowledge levels. The offered training would also motivate the workforce to apply their nursing informatics knowledge to construct and implement additional questions to comprehend the client’s digital literacy and an understanding of privacy, the functions of patient portals, secure messaging, and similar concepts.
Aside from needs assessments, I would create teaching materials to provide the staff with ideas on how to offer accommodations for low- and medium-literacy portal users. From qualitative research, healthcare consumers’ insufficient health literacy acts as a hindrance to their use of patient portals, with portal design peculiarities as one of the key contributors to confusion (Coughlin et al., 2018). In these materials, I would consider the basic principles of teaching low-literacy populations, including paraphrasing any medical jargon, speaking slowly, using visual cues, and avoiding information overload. Specifically, the staff would be advised to structure information hierarchically, proceed from the portal’s core purpose to separate functions and each function’s unique characteristics, conduct portal use demonstrations, and implement the teach-back technique with computer-illiterate patients. They would also be taught to produce printed step-by-step instructions with screenshots related to accessing a specific service, entering personal information safely, and seeking assistance from the provider’s office via messages. These practice-oriented recommendations would increase staff members’ flexibility as educators.
References
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2019). Health literacy measurement tools (revised). Web.
Coughlin, S. S., Stewart, J. L., Young, L., Heboyan, V., & De Leo, G. (2018). Health literacy and patient web portals. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 113, 43-48.