Patients with low health numeracy may struggle to interpret visual displays of outcomes
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Key takeaways:
- Health numeracy may be associated with patients’ ability to correctly interpret visual displays of their outcomes.
- Patients with low health numeracy struggled to understand visual displays of outcomes.
According to published results, patients with limited ability to understand and work with numbers may struggle to correctly interpret visual displays of their patient-reported outcome measures in a clinical setting.
Emily Ann Schultz, BS, a medical student in the department of orthopedic surgery at Stanford University, and colleagues surveyed 49 patients (mean age, 46.7 years) who presented to an outpatient orthopedic surgery clinic between December 2019 and January 2020.
Schultz and colleagues assessed patients’ health numeracy using the General Health Numeracy Test (GHNT-6), which measures patients’ ability to use numbers in a medical decision-making context. According to the study, they tested patients for accuracy on the following four patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) displays: bar graph, table, line graph and pictograph.
“There is a need to standardize baseline health numeracy through presenting the most accurately and easily interpreted displays to allow clinicians to communicate patients’ own outcome measures more effectively, address patients’ understanding of their health data and improve the shared decision-making process,” Schultz and colleagues wrote in the study.
Overall, Schultz and colleagues found patients with higher GHNT-6 scores were more likely to correctly answer display accuracy questions compared with patients with lower GHNT-6 scores.
Among all patients, 35% preferred the bar graph, 29% preferred the table, 20% preferred the line graph and 16% preferred the pictograph. Schultz and colleagues noted patients who preferred the table were more likely to answer display accuracy questions incorrectly (OR = 0.013). They also noted most patients preferred a combination of visuals and verbal explanations of PROMs, while no patients preferred a verbal explanation only.
Schultz and colleagues concluded patients’ health numeracy is associated with their ability to correctly interpret visual displays of PROMs.
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