Improving Interactive Health Literacy Skills of Older Adults: Lessons Learned From Formative Organizational Research With Community Partners.

Background: Meals on Wheels (MOW) organizations are ideal community partners for delivering social support relating to health information exchange for vulnerable and home-bound older adults.

Objectives: This article illustrates how formative organizational evaluation can be used to adapt health literacy interventions delivered by community partners.

Methods: Key informant interviews and ethnographic observations were conducted as part of a formative organizational evaluation of potential community partners.

Associations between older adults' spoken interactive health literacy and selected health care and health communication outcomes.

Recent trends in the conceptualization of health literacy lead toward expansive notions of health literacy as social practice, rather than as a narrower cognitive capacity to understand health-related texts and materials. These expansive and complex constructions of health literacy demand tools for assessing individuals' propensities to actively seek information in their interactions with health care professionals and other health information sources. This study proposes a measure of this information-exchange component of health literacy and examines its capacity to predict outcomes and processes such as satisfaction with health care and comprehension of spoken health messages.