Terry C. Davis, PhD
Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center

A pioneer in the field of health literacy, Terry Davis, is Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, LA (LSUHSC-S). For the past 25 years, she has led an interdisciplinary team investigating the impact of patient literacy on health and healthcare. Seminal achievements include development of the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM), the most widely used literacy test in healthcare settings, and development of user-friendly patient education and provider training materials.

Terry has authored more than 100 publications related to health literacy, health communication, and preventive medicine. She has served on Health Literacy Advisory Boards for both the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians Foundation (ACP-F). Terry was an independent agent on the IOM Committee on Health Literacy and a developer of the AMA’s Train-the-Trainer Health Literacy Curriculum. She is currently a member of the Healthy People 2010 Health Literacy/Health Communication Section and the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee.

Terry is the Principal Investigator (PI) on a five year NCI-funded grant to increase regular breast and CRC screening among patients with low literacy. She is also the PI on a national team that has developed and tested practical self-management diabetes and COPD guides and videos, which the ACP-F has distributed to more than a million patients. The team is working on a coronary artery disease guide.

Currently, she is a co-investigator on a CDC-funded project to teach vaccine safety through the Academic Pediatric Association’s online curriculum for residents and practicing physicians. Previously, she was a PI on several childhood immunization and newborn screening patient and provider education research projects funded by HRSA.