Promoting knowledge of statins in patients with low health literacy using an audio booklet

J Travis Gossey¹, Simon N Whitney², Michael A Crouch³, Maria L Jibaja-Weiss², Hong Zhang⁴, Robert J Volk^4
1Department of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, USA; ²Department of Family and Community Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA; ³Memorial Family Medicine Residency Program, Sugar Land, TX, USA; ⁴Department of General Internal Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Houston Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics, Houston, TX, USA

Background: Statins are generally well tolerated and effective at reducing a patient’s risk of both primary and secondary cardiovascular events. Many patients who would benefit from statin therapy either do not adhere to or stop taking their statin medication within the first year. We developed an audio booklet targeted to low health literacy patients to teach them about the benefits and risks of statins to help the patients adhere to their statin therapy.
Methods: Through focus groups and an iterative design, an audio booklet was developed for both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking patients. We then compared the booklet with standard of care in 132 patients from our target patient population to measure its impact on knowledge and understanding of statins.
Results: The patients enjoyed the audio booklet and showed significant increases in knowledge after listening to it when compared with those who received the standard of care materials.
Conclusion: The audio booklet shows promise as a tool that can be used effectively in clinical practice to teach patients about statin therapy.

Keywords: patient adherence, patient education, medical decision-making, hypercholesterolemia