The multimedia computer for low-literacy patient education: a pilot project of cancer risk perceptions.

Objective: Inadequate reading literacy is a major barrier to better educating patients. Despite its high prevalence, practical solutions for detecting and overcoming low literacy in a busy clinical setting remain elusive. In exploring the potential role for the multimedia computer in improving office-based patient education, we compared the accuracy of information captured from audio-computer interviewing of patients with that obtained from subsequent verbal questioning.

Setting: Adult medicine clinic, urban community health center

Patients: Convenience sample of patients awaiting clinic appointments (n = 59). Exclusion criteria included obvious psychoneurologic impairment or primary language other than English.

Intervention: A multimedia computer presentation that used audio-computer interviewing with localized imagery and voices to elicit responses to 4 questions on prior computer use and cancer risk perceptions.

Measurements And Main Results: Three patients refused or were unable to interact with the computer at all, and 3 patients required restarting the presentation from the beginning but ultimately completed the computerized survey. Of the 51 evaluable patients (72.5% African-American, 66.7% female, mean age 47.5 [+/- 18.1]), the mean time in the computer presentation was significantly longer with older age and with no prior computer use but did not differ by gender or race. Despite a high proportion of no prior computer use (60.8%), there was a high rate of agreement (88.7% overall) between audio-computer interviewing and subsequent verbal questioning.

Conclusions: Audio-computer interviewing is feasible in this urban community health center. The computer offers a partial solution for overcoming literacy barriers inherent in written patient education materials and provides an efficient means of data collection that can be used to better target patients' educational needs.