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About Health Literacy

Download our essential checklists: the Maryland Plain Language Checklist and our Web Content Review Tool.

Health Literacy Basics

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality AHRQ's Health Literacy resources help health care professionals and delivery organizations make information easier to understand and systems easier to navigate.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - Health Literacy Find background information, research, and key resources on health literacy in public health and health care. 

Health Literacy Resources: Introduction to Health Literacy The Health Sciences and Human Services Library at the University of Maryland Baltimore curates and maintains a wide-ranging collection with articles, videos, government resources and more.

Roundtable on Health Literacy The mission of the Roundtable is to inform, inspire, and activate a wide variety of stakeholders to support the development, implementation, and sharing of evidence-based health literacy practices and policies.

Population and Audience Research

The National Cancer Institute collects regularly collects national data on the public's knowledge of, attitudes about and use of cancer and other health-related information.

Pew Research Center collects, display and interprets the results of public surveys on major, nationally-discussed topics, including health and science.

The PIACC Skills Map provides model-based estimates of adult literacy and numeracy in all U.S. counties, states, and the District of Columbia. There are also estimates of literacy and numeracy proficiency by age and education groups at the state and county levels.

Essential Checklists

The Hub's State and Local Agency Workgroup created this plain language checklist based on one from the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange. Applying this checklist to revise existing content or write new content will help agencies comply with the plain language requirements in the Hub law.

This Horowitz Center-created Web Content Review Tool helps organizations review their web content. The tool addresses three categories of health literacy principles: actionable items, plain language, and content organization.