Every single American will have cephalagia at some point in their life.

Not sure what that means? Go ahead, ask ChatGPT. I’ll wait.

Today’s topic is health literacy. And let’s first start by actually defining what “health literacy” is, and why it’s critical, because to most healthcare marketers it’s not part of our vernacular. But it needs to be. As a follow up to my first article, where I made the argument that 2025 will be the tipping point towards “health” care and away from “sick care,” I believe health literacy should be the lens through which all marketers lead this movement.

Cut the jargon — what exactly is health literacy?

Keeping ourselves healthy is a part of our everyday life. It is the foods we eat. How we move our bodies. How we sleep. How we manage our stress. Our social interactions. Our happiness. All of these impact our health. Health is NOT just when we’re sick, or when we go to the doctor. Keeping ourselves healthy is the aggregate of our decisions during the 99% of time we’re not “sick.”

Health literacy is our ability to find, understand, and use information to keep ourselves healthy. It sounds simple enough, right?

Wrong. Almost nine out of ten people struggle to understand health information. But the sad fact is, that statistic isn’t nearly as eye-catching as it should be. Healthcare marketers, we shouldn’t breeze past that fact — it should be a call to action. We may not be able to cure cancer, but we can improve health literacy.

With so many voices, consumers don’t know who to listen to

Too often consumers are caught in the middle of a tug-of-war between healthcare providers, insurance companies, and now, social media. Getting health advice from family and peers is as old as time. Social media has expanded the pool of people offering that advice. Almost 20% of the population is looking to influencers on social media for health information. Not all of what they’re finding is good — have you heard of sleep maxxing?  

“Trust me, I’m a doctor,” isn’t enough for patients anymore. About 25% report feeling dismissed by their doctor when they are discussing symptoms. And 30% of people with chronic conditions don’t see their doctor as a regular source of information. That may be because average visit lengths are shrinking. Patients need to manage their health successfully in between visits, and we can help them do that.

Despite their assertions that healthcare providers are valued partners, insurance companies are making this worse. They loudly insist that they’re the best judge of what care is clinically appropriate. Denying care as “not medically necessary” adds a level of uncertainty to the provider-patient relationship and erodes trust. If you’re not up to date with the kind of chaos insurance companies can cause, read our recent report. For anyone who doesn’t eat, sleep, and breathe managed care, it’s both enlightening and infuriating.

Healthcare marketers, here’s your mission

Opportunity 1: Use language people understand

Some of the struggle to understand health information is connected to overall literacy in the United States. Here are some numbers I think about a lot:

• 36 – Our world ranking for population literacy
• 21 – The percent of adults in the U.S. that are illiterate
• 54 – The percent of adults who read below a sixth-grade level

Let me repeat that. More than half of the adults in this country who read at all read below a sixth-grade level. But even people who’ve finished high school have low health literacy scores. It’s only when people have finished a bachelor’s degree or higher that proficient health literacy breaks the 20% threshold. That’s a lot of people who have a hard time finding, understanding, and using health information.

What can healthcare marketers do about it — a lot

Start by using clear, plain language. Here’s where that first health fact comes in. Everyone will have cephalagia at some point in their life. Cephalagia is a medical term for garden variety headaches, something we all experience.

Writers who are comfortable with healthcare terminology tend to drop words like cephalagia or cardiovascular disease into copy without a lot of thought. Using plain language terms like headache or heart disease instead lets a wider audience interact with your content.

Opportunity 2: Connect behavior with higher health risk

Almost 100 million adult Americans have prediabetes, and 80% of them don’t know it. Making some basic lifestyle changes can cut their risk for developing diabetes in half. But they can’t fix what they don’t know they have.

Well-written health content and entertaining ads like this one can grab attention. Health risk assessments like the one mentioned in the ad are full of potential for healthcare marketers. You can personalize the type and intensity of your outreach based on user-specific data. And, in cases where the clinical risk is higher, you can quickly and easily connect people with care.

Opportunity 3: Help people learn new habits

The CDC reports that 42% of people in America have two or more chronic conditions, and 12% have at least five. Half of the top ten leading causes of death are associated with preventable and treatable chronic diseases. And about 90% of annual healthcare spending is related to managing and treating chronic diseases and mental health conditions.

As a nation, we can’t lower healthcare costs without getting serious about chronic condition, and this is where health literacy is key. If asked, most people would say that it’s important to exercise and eat a healthy diet. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that people don’t accurately assess how healthy their diet is. Unless they think it’s unhealthy — in which case they were right 97% of the time.

Chronic conditions share many of the same modifiable risk factors: unhealthy eating patterns, physical inactivity, tobacco use, unmanaged stress, and poor sleep. But we can’t begin to address them by giving people a laundry list of healthier choices. We need to be specific.

As an example, “get more sleep” needs to become “aim for at least seven hours of good quality sleep.” Then we need to offer follow up information on what that means and how to achieve it. This is storytelling with a purpose — to help people recognize unhealthy choices and begin to build new habits.

Health literacy transforms wearable data into actionable insights

The wearable market is big business – worth over $110 billion a year right now. And it’s projected to triple in revenue by 2032. Smart watches, fitness trackers, and biosensors are a treasure trove of health data. What is all that data getting us? Sure, it’s great to know how much REM sleep, light sleep, and deep sleep I’m getting. And it’s somewhat disheartening to know how interrupted my sleep can be.

If wearables give consumers access to real-time health data, why hasn’t that translated into a rise in healthy behaviors? Because data on its own isn’t helpful if you don’t know what to do with it. Which brings us right back to the original problem: low levels of health literacy. Who do we know that can help people translate that data into action? That’s right healthcare marketers, it’s us.

Final thoughts

“I believe marketing is the most powerful force available to people who want to make change. And with that power comes responsibility. We (anyone with the ability to tell a story—online, in print or to the people in our communities) have the ability to change things more dramatically than ever before in history.” — Seth Godin in All Marketers Are Liars

In my last post, I issued a challenge to my fellow healthcare marketers. We need to ask ourselves if we’re having a meaningful impact on the health of our communities. There are too many things beyond our control when it comes to improving health. But this area isn’t one of them. We’re not stuck screaming into echo chambers. We can improve the health literacy of our consumers.

It starts with talking openly and often about what we’re doing. I invite you to join me in the conversation. Follow me on LinkedIn. Follow Unlock Health on LinkedIn.  Let us know what you think and what you’re doing to meet the evolving needs of our audience.

Join me next time for the third installment in this digital transformation series. We’ll go deep into measuring the success of the modern healthcare marketer. 

Unlock Health is the largest and most awarded marketing and advertising agency exclusively focused on U.S. healthcare providers. Deep expertise in the business of healthcare allows our full-service agency to blend bold creative with data-driven insights to connect consumers with care and make great work easier for our clients.