Understanding and Addressing the Digital Health Literacy Needs of Low-Income Limited English Proficient Asian American Patients
George Lee, Anita Chang, Agnita Pal, Thu-An Tran, Xinyue Cui, Thu Quach
Abstract
Introduction: During the pandemic, Asian Health Services (AHS), a federally qualified health center serving patients in 14 Asian languages, transformed rapidly to provide telehealth visits, developed an intensive remote patient monitoring program, and conducted a digital health literacy survey. Method: This article describes how AHS collected and utilized descriptive data on our patient population to inform our rapid adoption of telehealth and assess our patients' response to these changes. Results: Our experiences show that audio visits are invaluable for our patients. In addition, our remote monitoring program resulted in 96% of patients improving their blood pressure control. Conclusion: Many barriers to widespread adoption of telehealth exist, including low digital literacy and the need for in-language digital training. Disaggregated data by ethnicity and language are needed to inform future work.