Meeting the information and communication needs of health disparate populations.

Abstract

Meeting the information and communication needs of health disparate populations in a culturally congruent and health literate manner is foundational to advancing health equity, health status, and health-related quality of life. The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association has published seminal papers on this topic over the last 15 years.1–10 Papers have addressed important factors related to meeting information and communication needs including health literacy, numeracy, and graph literacy1,2,4; described innovative solutions for meeting information and communication needs3–10; and conducted comparative evaluations of visual strategies.6–9 In this editorial, I briefly summarize 5 papers that contribute to the literature on these topics. In 2 papers, the authors report user studies of data visualizations of longitudinal data, that is, systolic blood pressure values11 and patient-reported outcomes (PROs) that include measures of health and graph literacy.12 A review paper focuses on the natural language processing literature for automatic simplification of existing biomedical text for consumers and identifies strategies for addressing challenges to progress in the field.13 As the foundation for public health dashboards that effectively communicate with a variety of audiences including the lay public, Ansari and Martin14 describe formative work for the creation of a heuristic evaluation checklist for public health dashboards. In the fifth paper, Valdez et al15 highlight the disability community as a health disparate population and offer a set of guidelines for effective engagement to create digital health technologies that more fully meet the information and communication needs of all disabled individuals.