Health Literacy in Heart Failure: A Review of the Gaps and Challenges

Health literacy has an essential role in heart failure (HF), contributing to medication adherence, disease self-management, and interactions with care providers. Yet, data on interventions to enhance health literacy are scarce. HF guidelines identify health literacy as an individual-level barrier to HF management but offer limited guidance on addressing limited health literacy. Healthy People 2030 recognizes individual and organizational health literacy as essential for health equity, calling on organizations to enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others. This review summarizes interventions to address health literacy in individuals with HF. We identify the literature's chief limitations: heterogeneity of health literacy measurement, inconsistent outcomes, generalizability, absence of assessment of sustainability of interventions, and missing role of implementation science. In response to the limitations in the literature identified here, we articulate a call to action to develop and implement effective, sustainable, scalable interventions to address personal and organizational health literacy in HF and thereby advance health equity.