Words from our CEO, Anders Nejsum
October 10, 2023
What’s the current status, and what can we do to improve them?
Our CEO Anders Nejsum on the statistics of health literacy, and how Visikon attempts to improve them with our audio-visual approach to health communication:
If we find ourselves in need of treatment, we often have to educate ourselves on different aspects of our situation. Typically, this implies that a healthcare professional will do their best to effectively communicate complex information, ensuring patients and their relatives are well-informed.
The only problem is, that we are all wonderfully different. We learn in different ways and experience symptoms vastly different. Paired with all sorts of emotions, processing health related information only becomes more challenging.
The result?
A lot of us get lost in information overload, that in the worst of cases will affect our health.
On a basic level, health literacy describes the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information to make health-related decisions for themselves and their loved ones.
According to a 2015 study on European health literacy, 47.6% of respondents from eight EU countries were found to have inadequate or problematic health literacy levels. Similarly, a study from 2018 showed that 36% of U.S. adults had basic or below-basic health literacy rates.
That has to change.
The founding idea at Visikon is to create health care communication everyone understands. This is to ensure better treatment for the individual patients, but at a more holistic level, I’m proud that our solutions support United Nations Sustainable Development Goal no. 3 of ensuring healthy lives, and promoting well-being for all, at all ages.
Our approach in achieving that, is through audio-visual solutions that empower both patients and relatives. My Treatment is exactly that. In an animated universe highlighting their specific treatment, My Treatment enables users to educate themselves at their own pace – before, during, and after treatment.
We believe that such solutions are vital to improving health literacy, and we are constantly working on expanding the My Treatment universe with new treatments for new patients and new distribution and integration channels.
