The Department of Psychiatry at Nova Southeastern University College of Osteopathic Medicine was awarded a four-year, $1.35 million grant in August from the National Institutes of Health National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute to conduct research related to the development and validation of a computer-administered health literacy measure. The project’s long-term goal involves developing interventions to improve health literacy with patients in clinical practice to provide them with the tools they need to be effective and critical consumers of health care services.
Project objectives include developing a health literacy measure that will be computer-administered, acceptable to diverse groups, and psychometrically equivalent for Spanish- and English-speaking and older and younger persons. As the project progress, the intention is to validate the new measure by assessing its relation to other measures of health literacy and to measures of reading comprehension, numeracy, and cognitive abilities as well as provide additional evidence of the new health literacy measure’s validity by relating scores on it to health-related quality of life, self-reported health status, and health care service utilization.
