A Prototype Interactive Mapping Tool to Target Low Health Literacy in Missouri
ResearchPublished Apr 29, 2010
An estimated 36 percent of American adults have health literacy levels rated at “basic or below,” indicating that they have difficulty obtaining, processing, and understanding basic health information and services. To help healthcare decisionmakers in Missouri identify neighborhood-level “hotspots” of suboptimal health or healthcare that may be due to low health literacy, RAND developed a prototype interactive web-based mapping tool. This builds on earlier RAND work to develop a predictive model of health literacy and estimate levels of health literacy in small geographic areas (e.g., census tracts). The interactive mapping tool allows stakeholders to select the level of geography (e.g., census tract, county), obtain information for and map specific regions of interest, select the characteristics to be mapped (i.e., estimates of community-level health literacy, health outcomes and care quality, neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics, and neighborhood health services data), and generate tables and reports on the regions and characteristics of interest. Housed on a dedicated RAND website, the mapping tool makes it possible for a range of stakeholders, from health plans to community organizations, to access and use the tool to help address healthcare disparities in their communities. This report describes the tool and includes a User's Guide and Case Study.
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Product Details
- Release Date: Apr 29, 2010
- Copyright: RAND Corporation
- Status: Retired
- Document Number: TR-811-MFH
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Martin, Laurie T., Allen Fremont, Alexandria Felton, Teague Ruder, Chloe E. Bird, Lisa Kraus, Mark Alan Hanson, and Nicole Lurie, A Prototype Interactive Mapping Tool to Target Low Health Literacy in Missouri, RAND Corporation, TR-811-MFH, 2010. As of September 23, 2024: https://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR811.html
Martin, Laurie T., Allen Fremont, Alexandria Felton, Teague Ruder, Chloe E. Bird, Lisa Kraus, Mark Alan Hanson, and Nicole Lurie, A Prototype Interactive Mapping Tool to Target Low Health Literacy in Missouri. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010. https://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR811.html.
This work was sponsored by the Missouri Foundation for Health. The research was conducted in RAND Health, a division of the RAND Corporation.
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