Health Equity/Social Determinants of Health
Literacy
Joy Solano, MD, MHPE (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Hospital Medicine
Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Margaret Wood, MD, MPH (she/her/hers)
Associate Professor
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, Texas, United States
It’s 2025! Where do we go from here? References to what is now called health literacy are cited as early as the late 1950s, but since the turn of the millennium, health literacy research has rapidly expanded no doubt in part due to the national emphasis on health literacy by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Health literacy has since been identified as a social determinant of health with several national organizations urging physicians to find ways to mitigate low health literacy’s effects on children. Despite the passage of more than 70 years, we have only scratched the surface, and health literacy remains an active area of research interest. The APA Health Literacy SIG has recently published two articles to contribute to this body of literature and is now thinking about meaningful next steps to move the direction of health literacy research towards measuring patient outcomes. Therefore, the SIG is hosting a panel of well-published health literacy experts to discuss where the field of health literacy is today and identify the opportunities of tomorrow. We will spend the first 30 minutes presenting an overview of recent health literacy research conducted by our panelists followed by a Q&A session with the audience. The goal of the session is to identify gaps in current health literacy literature and craft meaningful, feasible and actionable research questions with input from health literacy experts.
SIG Speaker: Joy L. Solano, MD, MHPE (she/her/hers) – Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics
SIG Speaker: Margaret Wood, MD, MPH (she/her/hers) – Baylor College of Medicine
