Numeracy in health care

Many scholars who study physician communication are concerned about the words physicians use and whether patients can understand those words. Indeed, words are important, but an often over-looked part of communication is how physicians use, and patients interpret, numbers.

One of the doctors in my department at the Medical College of Wisconsin has just received a grant from the NIH to develop a measure of health numeracy. Numeracy is one of the concepts the Institute of Health highlights in its definition of health literacy, but is often overlooked in traditional health literacy research. How patients interpret numbers is important in everything from understanding doses of medicine to the assessing riskiness of a surgical procedure. And I imagine, not many doctors stop and think about how the patients understand the numbers they hear in the course of a visit.

The topic reminded me of a pair of books by John Allen Paulos: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. These are both great books to make you think about the consequences of a society that doesn't comprehend numbers. And it's not just about simple math, but being able to use and apply mathematics in situations such as risk and probability. It is an important alarm that we all need to sharpen our numeracy skills. And physicians need to take the time to make sure their patients are numerically literate.