Poor health literacy is common occurring in a third of the adult population.1 Rates of low health literacy are higher in the elderly, those with limited education, lower income, chronic medical conditions and those who are non-native English speakers. Low health literacy is associated with limited knowledge of health conditions and increased likelihood of poor adherence, rehospitalisation, morbidity and mortality.2–4 Limited health literacy has also been associated with approximately double the risk of not achieving guideline blood pressure recommendations.5 Health literacy as defined by the American Heart Association is the degree to which individuals can access and process basic health information and services and thereby participate in health-related decisions.3 Improved health literacy may be achieved by various education tools. There are increasing amounts and increasing complexity of cardiac educational material provided to patients, including electronic patient portals and other internet-based tools. There is also increasing capture of the young by computer devices. Greater health literacy is required to navigate these. Health literacy requires multiple skills beyond reading, writing and numeracy and includes interpretation of images, oral communication and may include social networking. As many as 11 fundamental and inter-related skills have been reported to make up and define health literacy (table 1).3 View this table: Table 1 Health literacy skills and competency domains3 The increasing health information that comes via the internet and social media will not reach the many older people without access to technology and will also exclude those without understanding of how to access and interpret the information. There is also the increasing challenge of sifting ‘false information’ from facts on these platforms. In this issue of the journal,6 McIntyre and colleagues6 describe the results of a randomised single centre clinical trial with 330 participants …

中文翻译：

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候诊室平板电脑可提高健康素养和心血管结果

三分之一的成年人普遍缺乏健康素养。1 老年人、受教育程度低、收入较低、患有慢性疾病的人和母语非英语的人的健康素养低的比例更高。健康素养低与对健康状况的了解有限以及依从性差、再住院、发病率和死亡率增加的可能性增加有关。2-4 有限的健康素养也与未达到指导血压建议的风险增加约一倍有关。5 健康素养根据美国心脏协会的定义，个人可以获得和处理基本健康信息和服务从而参与健康相关决策的程度。3 可以通过各种教育工具提高健康素养。提供给患者的心脏教育材料的数量和复杂性不断增加，包括电子患者门户和其他基于互联网的工具。计算机设备对年轻人的捕获也越来越多。需要更多的健康素养来驾驭这些。健康素养需要阅读、写作和算术以外的多种技能，包括图像解读、口头交流，可能还包括社交网络。据报道，多达 11 项基本和相互关联的技能构成和定义了健康素养（表 1）。3 查看此表：表 1 健康素养技能和能力领域3 通过互联网和社交媒体提供的越来越多的健康信息将无法到达许多无法获得技术的老年人，并且还将排除那些不了解如何获取和解释信息的人。从这些平台上的事实中筛选“虚假信息”的挑战也越来越大。在本期杂志中，6 McIntyre 及其同事 6 描述了一项有 330 名参与者参与的随机单中心临床试验的结果……