Non-compliant or illiterate?

July 24, 2007

Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell:

Most medical schools don’t spend much, if any, time teaching their students how to cope with low-literacy patients, and most doctors aren’t particularly adept at detecting reading problems “” or knowing what to do when they identify someone who can’t read. And with the specter of “pay for performance,” in which doctors’ reimbursement will be tied to meeting certain quality goals, there is concern that physicians will shun low-literacy patients, seeing them as too tough to treat.



Related posts:

  1. "One easy way to get compliance is to see only compliant patients"
  2. Foreign doctors to treat the newly insured
  3. The future of primary care payment?
  4. Does pay-for-performance work, and will it improve health care quality or patient outcomes?
  5. Pay for performance unintended consequences
  6. Non-compliance
  7. Sliding payment scale


KevinMD.com on Facebook


  Follow on Twitter   Subscribe



{ 3 comments }

1 Anonymous July 24, 2007 at 9:01 am

Great. Now in addition to asking people if they “feel safe in their home environement”, or have guns in the house, we’ll have to ask if they can actually READ the eye chart.

2 KoKo July 24, 2007 at 7:03 pm

More nonsense.

3 Anonymous July 24, 2007 at 8:20 pm

Is it “no child left behind”?

But why do those people who claim to be “dyslexic”, “learning disabled” ,etc. seem to be the ones most able to decipher quickly whether the prescription they just received were “the good medicine…that works for me” or not their class 2 or 3 drug of choice???

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post: Professionalisms vs lifestyle

Next post: Dr. RW turns two

Site Meter