Leveraging Organizational Health Literacy to Enhance Health Promotion and Risk Prevention: A Narrative and Interpretive Literature Review

Organizational health literacy involves the health care organizations’ ability to establish an empowering and co-creating relationship with patients, engaging them in the design and delivery of health services in collaboration with health professionals. Although scholars agree that organizational health literacy contributes to health promotion and risk prevention via patient empowerment, literature is not consistent in depicting the interplay between organizational health literacy and preventive medicine. The article intends to shed light into this issue, summarizing current knowledge about this topic and advancing avenues for further development. A narrative literature review was performed through a systematic search on PubMed(®), Scopus(®), and Web of Science(™). The review focused on 50 relevant contributions. Organizational health literacy triggers the transition towards a patient-centered approach to care. It complements individual health literacy, enabling patients to actively participate in health promotion and risk prevention as co-producers of health services and co-creators of value. However, many obstacles – including lack of time and limited resources available – prevent the transition towards health literate health care organizations. Two initiatives are required to overcome extant barriers. On the one hand, a health literate workforce should be prepared to increase the institutional ability of health care organizations to empower and engage patients in health co-creation. On the other hand, increased efforts should be made to assess organizational health literacy and to make its contribution to preventive medicine explicit.