In Health Care, Knowledge Is Power

In health care, being an informed consumer is essential to promoting positive outcomes. Whether the issue is finding affordable care where prices vary widely, minimizing harm from medical errors, or just finding a provider, knowledge is power. Navigating the health care system is hard enough, even for health care professionals. Our most vulnerable—the uninsured, those in poverty, family caregivers, and non-English speakers—are at high risk of receiving lower-quality care, in part, because they lack the information to make choices that work for them.

To address this problem, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has launched Right Place, Right Time, a special research initiative, to better understand the challenges that vulnerable patients face in accessing health care information and to create recommendations for improving access to such information.