To make any major decision in life, vital information is the key, right? ☝
On a visit to the doctor, after walking in and paying the amount, we aren’t really worried about whether we understand the disease or the ailment. We know, peacefully, that our job from this moment onwards is to just go inside, listen to the learned person explain the issue and take whatever pills they give to us. Whatever it is that has happened to us, the doctor will find it — and if they can’t, we can rest assured they will at least tell us what the next steps in our diagnosis or treatment are supposed to be.
Yes, your doctor does know medicine, and yes, they do know how to treat most problems, but your health is not a one-person job. Thinking so is wrong & dangerous.
Why is health literacy super important?
To understand this better, let’s imagine both steps of your medical journey — diagnosis and treatment.
Whenever you feel that there is something wrong with your body, the first thing that needs to be done is diagnosis.
The identification of the disease that is causing your illness. In this step, the first step usually is the physician asking you about the problems you have been facing because of whatever is troubling you. Based on these problems and some other questions about your lifestyle & history, your doctor then suggests some tests to you (should you need one).
Now in this process of diagnosis, it’s very easy to think that everything is being controlled by the doctor. But if you look closer, at the very first step, the doctor is dependent on you about info on how you are feeling. So if you aren’t actively involved in the process or are incapable of providing the right information to the doctor, you could miss something crucial. You could miss out on the fact that for the past few days, you feeling lightheaded can indeed be a symptom of a serious life-threatening problem.
In the first step of diagnosis the doctor isn’t the only person that determines whether your issues get identified. You are also involved, sometimes even more than your doctor.
Let’s move on now to the process of treatment.
During treatment, we are often asked to make complicated choices. Often, doctors leave it up to their patients to decide which treatment option to go with because they only know the chances of success with each one — not what the patient wants. This makes health literacy all the more important. Because in these situations, when making life and death decisions, you don’t want to have the doctors take the final call themselves because you weren’t able to understand all the terms.
And that is just diagnosis and treatment! Before all of this comes a person’s lifestyle, arguably the main driver of healthcare issues. At the end of the day, we have to understand health and healthcare better to appropriate that knowledge in the way we live so we stay as far away from health issues as possible.
Overall, from lifestyle, to diagnosis, to treatment, health literacy is very important — having a general idea of what happens within your body can be the difference between life and death.
But that begs the question, are people medically aware?
Is India Medically Literate?
As far as medical awareness is concerned, in India, at least 9 out of 10 adults suffer from low health literacy.
Even if one ignores health insurance awareness — another critical part of awareness — less than half of urban Indians know even the most basic healthcare terms. There are many reasons for this.
🌸🌸 The first, of course, is the fact that most of India still lives in rural areas, where healthcare penetration is selective. While people in rural areas tend to be very healthy in general and in practice, they tend to also be uninformed about some specific health problems such as thyroid-related disorders, diabetes, etc.
💻✍ The second is that even within urban areas, our poor education systems have failed in teaching kids about the human body. And so even when kids do learn biology, do they know why they tell you to have a glass of warm water first thing in the morning?
As far as working professionals are concerned, they aren’t doing very well either. With sedentary, yet fast and busy lives, most people have lost touch with their bodies. Ask an athlete how he feels and chances are that he will tell you exactly how his body feels, but the same will never be true for someone working in Corporate.
What’s the cause of this issue?
A huge part of this problem is how lab reports are usually handled across the globe, and how there is a lack of intelligent two-way communication between the patient and his/her physician.
Usually, one tends to pay the most attention to something in their lives when it directly impacts them. When sitting idle, there is no incentive within the minds of the average person to look up and start reading more about blood sugar and what causes its problems.
But this changes when someone has a health issue and gets a medical test report. Now, they have an active interest in finding out what’s wrong with them. But sadly, even in a situation where they want to learn, and a situation where they literally have a report that is supposed to tell them what they want to know, the report cannot facilitate that. Because all that their health report contains is some random numbers that they can’t comprehend splattered across a piece of paper without any context or any roadmap about where these people are supposed to head to next.
The only hope is doctors. But sadly, doctors are not free all the time to explain everything in depth.
This is a very solvable problem, too! Healthcare is uniquely suited to produce a large impact just with small overall changes. Something as simple as basic informational campaigns can create large, tectonic shifts in people’s outlooks and therefore their health. Currently, modern design and technology are so nascent within this industry, that it is rife for some innovator to bring in change through just a small tweaking of the overall system.
Okay, so thus far, here’s what we have learned-
- Health literacy is very important when deciding our own (potentially life-saving) treatment
- India has a severe health literacy problem
- This problem comes from how healthcare education works in India, and how lab test reports are made in India
Which now brings us to one simple question.
How do we solve this problem?
Healthcare is a unique industry, because it responds best to small, incremental innovations (unless a certain Alexander Fleming discovers Penicillin of course).
The first thing that we need to solve here is the mindset. Before the lack of information comes the tendency to not want this information at all. So what we must do is first create this need within people’s minds to actively try to know more about their health. And this requires them to first realise why it’s a good thing to be medically literate.
We can start by talking to the people we know in our daily conversations, giving them a sense of how important health awareness can be and asking them to pass it on to the people that they know.
As a stellar example of this, the Centre for Disease Control in the United States started a clear action plan for improving health literacy, which took the form of awareness programs that improved health literacy outlook among more than 5 different states in more than 10% of the entire US population. This same health literacy program, using this tactic of changing outlooks, made some observable reductions in the mortality rates of certain diseases within the US.
The second thing that we need to also do is to make sure that our children are medically aware. Once a person does become medically literate, they then start to become more likely to also spread medical literacy around the world. We need to sit down and teach kids about the value of knowing what happens to their biological structure. And this is important — because the foundation of awareness starts right at the first educational step.
Which brings us to medical reports.
Medical reports, as we learned, are a very good opportunity to provide to an ailing person ☞ potentially life-changing information ☜ about their disease. And most medical reports, as we already established, don’t do this at all. They just provide whatever data they are paid for so that this data can be read by a doctor and not a consumer. And that is why we need Smart Reports.
While the average test report is aimed at your doctor, your Smart Reports are also aimed at you. They are built so that you know what each term there means, and what you can do to make sure that these numbers stay within their healthy range. Developed through consultation with a team of the country’s best experts, these reports are built to cater to all possible needs that a test report can fulfill.
Smart Reports can be a very effective tool to eliminate the major issue of health literacy in India. When people receive a Smart Report at a point in their lives when healthcare knowledge is essential, they will inevitably realise how important it is to know the value of it.
And that is exactly why these reports are essential, and also why we are putting so much time and care into making them here at NirogGyan.
Smart lab test reports are essential. We are sure you knew that before, and if not, COVID-19 or this article must have done that by now.
At NIROGGYAN, we know how important your health is. Our products in the form of user-friendly lab test reports are meant to improve health awareness & better living. All so you can live a better life.
Visit us at niroggyan.com to know more.
