Abstract #105723

Satoru Isaka, PhD, iTriage.org, 6081 Meridian Avenue, #70-300, San Jose, CA 95120, 408-455-2632, sisaka@itriage.org and Hien T. Nguyen, MD, Emergency Department, Kaiser Permanente Santa Teresa Medical Center, 250 Hospital Pkway, San Jose, CA 95119.

Self-management is recognized as an important priority for the medically uninsured to reduce their health risks, to control service utilization, and to contain health care costs; however, health literacy skills stand as a critical prerequisite to achieving proper self-management. While many characteristics are common between those people with a low level of literacy and the medically uninsured, little is known how to overcome issues regarding financial constraints, language proficiency, educational and cultural backgrounds, geographic locations, and varied individual health care needs.

We describe a new undergoing research that aims to promote health literacy and self-management by utilizing information technologies. The research identifies desired properties and a model use of technologies to overcome common barriers in language, culture and content complexity that prevent people from obtaining actionable health care information wherever and whenever needed. The research demonstrates and evaluates a new multi-modal self-service technology to help remote and urban English and Spanish-speaking populations to access actionable health information on demand. The multi-modal property allows the research to address literacy skills in listening and speaking, in addition to reading and writing skills.

The research answers important questions of how technologies with different user interaction and content delivery techniques affect people with varied levels of literacy based on education, language preference, and context in individual health care needs. The research also addresses the safety, quality and economic merits of technologies based on industry standards and open source software in the context of promoting health literacy and self-management.

Learning Objectives:

• At the conclusion of the session, the participant will be able to identify desired properties and a model use of information technologies to promote health literacy and self-management and to overcome their common barriers.
• The participant will also be able to describe the safety, quality and economic merits of technologies based on industry standards and open source software.
• The participant will also be able to answer important questions of how technologies affect people with varied levels of literacy based on education, language preference, and context in individual health care needs.

Keywords: Literacy, Technology

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.