Background and Significance: Low levels of health literacy can have a detrimental effect on a patient’s ability to navigate the complex healthcare system. Healthcare systems and providers must work to make healthcare more accessible to all the populations that they serve. This includes delivering patient education in a way that the patient can understand. Given that Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a deadly non-communicable disease, health-literacy friendly interventions should be used to improve patient outcomes. This pilot will look to merge both health literacy and the COPD patient population in a COPD health literacy educational toolkit.

Purpose: The purpose of this pilot is to implement health-literacy friendly interventions during patient education of the COPD patient population that will increase the patient’s ability to self-manage their chronic illness.

Methods: The implementation site for this pilot is a pulmonary medicine unit with a large population of COPD patients at an urban, tertiary care hospital in the Midwest. Patients included in this pilot will be any patient suffering from COPD admitted to the pulmonary medicine unit during the implementation period.

Evaluation: Patients were administered a validated and reliable COPD knowledge questionnaire as a pre and post assessment to determine if their understanding of their chronic health condition increased by the time of discharge.