Background: Patient education breast biopsy brochures are a useful tool to provide to patients at the time of biopsy recommendation. We recognized that our patient education materials needed to be updated to meet broader health literacy guidelines and increase inclusivity to reach a more diverse patient population. Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others. Health literacy is different from basic literacy, and patients with good literacy skills do not necessarily have good health literacy skills. Studies have shown nearly half of the American population have low or marginal health literacy. Because it is difficult to identify patients with poor health literacy, guidelines from the American Medical Association (AMA) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) recommend adopting universal literacy precautions. Patient education materials should be also inclusive of race, ethnicity, and gender. We revised some of our illustrations to include darker skin tones as well as smaller breasted illustrations to be more inclusive of the transgender and male community. The text was edited to be inclusive of non-cisgender females. We also developed a system to allow patients to access these materials electronically through our institution’s free and accessible database. Laminated cards with procedure illustrations and pictures were made including QR codes linking directly to the specific text document. The illustration-only cards are useful tool when describing a procedure to the patient.
Learning Objectives: To describe developing patient education materials to improve patient health literacy, be more inclusive, and be electronically accessible.
Abstract Content/Results: The presentation will be formatted as a pictorial and text review and how-to guide to develop these educational materials. Health literacy will be defined, and, using images of the original and updated patient education materials, we will explain font, formatting, and language choices designed to improve patient health literacy. Diversity of patient education materials and appropriate language choices will be discussed. Images will show illustrations and language showing inclusion and diversity in our updated materials. Images and descriptions of the laminated cards with QR codes linking to online patient education materials will be shown in comparison to the original brochures.
Conclusion: Patient education materials are highly beneficial to our patients. When developing these materials, content, readability, audience, and accessibility should be considered.
