AHRQ-Funded Talking Touchscreen® Expanded for New Uses

The Talking Touchscreen®, a multimedia health information technology tool, was developed as a user-friendly way of assessing patient-reported outcomes and as a tool to help end health disparities in underserved populations. The CancerHelp Talking Touchscreen® and DiabetesHelp Talking Touchscreen® have been integrated with the CancerHelp Institute’s patient education programs. Patients now have access to information from AHRQ, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases on treatment, support, side effects and screening. 

The Talking Touchscreen framework has also been built into an application called Health LiTT (available at http://www.healthlitt.org ), a measure of health literacy that can be self-administered in either English or Spanish using sound, text, and images. It covers health- and insurance-related topics and informed consent. The Talking Touchscreen/La Pantalla Parlanchina and Health LiTT have also been incorporated into Assessment Center, a free online research management tool that helps researchers create study-specific Web sites for securely capturing participant data (available at http://www.assessmentcenter.net ). By overcoming assessment barriers to self-administration of questionnaires, these tools enable new insight into previously undetected disease or treatment problems among low literacy patients, and also enable real-time reporting of health literacy scores.
The CancerHelp-Talking Touchscreen is available at http://www.cancerhelp.org .

To learn more about how this innovative tool is helping patients, read the Impact Case Study at: http://www.ahrq.gov/policymakers/case-studies/cp31312.html.