An Educational Approach for Improving Health Literacy in Patients with Heart Failur

This project sought to modify an existing HF education book, which aimed to improve the quality of HF patient education and increase health literacy levels while achieving lower rates of hospital readmission and acute care utilization in patients with a recent HF admission. This quality improvement project utilized a quasi-experimental design. Participants were voluntarily enrolled as inpatients who possessed either new or existing diagnosis of heart failure and were going to follow up in the Advanced Heart Failure Clinic. Patients arrived for an education session and a pretest/posttest health literacy assessment using the short form of the test of functional health literacy in adults and the newest vital sign prior to their scheduled hospital follow-up visit.;After the education session, 58% of patients demonstrated an improvement in health literacy levels. Twenty-five percent of patients scored perfect scores on the health literacy screening tools and could not show an improvement. The greatest benefit on health literacy levels as measured by the S-TOFHLA was seen in the patient population who were diagnosed within one year of the visit (p=0.0278). The secondary outcome of 30-day readmission rate for this sample was 8.33%. This is lower than the hospital average 30-day readmission rate of 20.1%. Overall, the quality improvement project has shown a positive impact on patient health literacy levels and may indicate an improvement of 30-day readmission rates. A larger sample size will be required to definitively show a positive impact on 30-day readmission rates and acute care utilization rates.