Sessions
Health Literacy 101 - An Introduction to the Field
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM Wed
Welcome / Conference Overview
8:00 AM - 8:20 AM Thu
Closing
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM Fri
Michael Villaire, MSLM, is President and Chief Executive Officer for the Institute for Healthcare Advancement, a nonprofit healthcare 501(c)(3) public charity dedicated to empowering people to better health, with a major mission emphasis on health literacy.
Mr. Villaire has written numerous articles on various aspects of health literacy, and lectures nationally on health literacy. He is co-author of the textbook, Health Literacy in Primary Care: A Clinician’s Guide, published by Springer in 2007, and the self-help health book, What To Do When Your Child Is Heavy, published by IHA in 2009.
His background includes 20 years as managing editor for peer-reviewed journals in nursing and medicine, hospital publications, physician news magazines, and an online healthcare portal experiment for WebMD. He has helped redesign and launch several medical and nursing journals, and managed the development of a multimedia, interactive curriculum in critical care.
Mr. Villaire earned his baccalaureate degrees in English (Journalism) and in Communications from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Mich. He earned his Master’s of Science in Organizational Leadership and Management from the University of La Verne, La Verne, Calif., in 2006. His thesis examined health literacy in community clinics in regard to adequacy of patient education materials.
As its CEO, Mr. Villaire leads IHA’s health literacy initiatives, which include the self-help health book series, “What To Do For Health,” all of which are written at a 3rd- to 5th-grade reading level; IHA’s annual continuing education health literacy conference; and IHA’s consulting service, which includes rewrite services, organizational assessment/systems change, document writing, video production, focus group/testing, conference management, training/curriculum development, and IHA’s growing research agenda in health literacy.