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Health Literacy

What is Health Numeracy?

Health numeracy describes a person’s ability to find, understand, use, and communicate clinical and public health data. This includes how patients understand and use statistics, test results, and other mathematical information to make healthcare decisions. Like health literacy, there is limited large scale research available on health numeracy. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy showed that the participants who reported the worst health also had the lowest health numeracy.