Scientists, Students, and Crowds: A Collaboration to Improve Health Literacy

Abstract

Where language and literacy barriers exist, medical researchers continue to do a poor job of ensuring access toclinical trials. Feedback from key stakeholders suggests that incorporating visual aids into the consent process canfacilitate enrollment of neglected populations. This study was initiated to examine whether a collaboration between ateaching hospital and fine arts institution that introduced the topic of health literacy to student artists could be used togenerate medical research-related images. Crowdsourcing was used to examine the effectiveness of the illustrationsand provide students with feedback from a lay audience. Twenty-five student artists and 184 survey respondentsparticipated in this study. Combined positive ratings of “very” or “fairly” effective ranged from 5-91% whilenegative ratings of “slightly” or “not” well ranged from 5-89%. Collaborations, as explored in this paper, canpromote minority awareness and provide a novel mechanism by which to communicate complex research-relatedconcepts to patients with limited literacy.