The Benefits of Health Literacy

Improving Your Health Literacy

Health literacy is a problem, and assessing it can be dicey. Patients can feel ashamed when they don’t understand words or concepts, and  they might feel bad about the whole patient experience.

We believe health literacy is vital to patient’s well-being. Marathon Health was founded on the belief that our most important job is to help people manage their own health and healthcare. Their active involvement is central and key to long lasting improvements in health.

We provide health coaching in a respectful, nonjudgmental style that allows people to address health issues that are important to them. We provide education content on our eHealth portal for patients, and next year will begin a pilot project to provide additional educational content at some of our health centers. But at this study points out, educational content isn’t helpful if it isn’t delivered in a manner the patient can understand. One of the ways we overcome this is through our partnership Healthwise, which is our online wellness educational content provider. Healthwise provides 1- to 3-page patient education documents that provide people with information about specific episodes of care in an easy to understand manner, and designed to answer questions that patients and their families often have.

In the end, Marathon Health believes when people understand the choices that impact their health they gain a new perspective — one that isn’t about being treated when sick, but rather about achieving their best possible health.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds us that taking care of ourselves and our health is more than just going to the doctor. We need to take care of our health everyday.