Terry C. Davis, PhD

Terry Davis is a pioneer in the field of Health Literacy, is a Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport ( 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) and creation of user- friendly patient education and provider training materials that are being used nationally.
Dr. Davis has more than one hundred publications related to health literacy and health communication. She has served on Health Literacy Advisory Boards for both the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians Foundation (ACP-F). Dr. Davis was an independent agent on the IOM Committee on Health Literacy and a developer of the AMA’s Train-the-Trainer Health Literacy Curriculum. Currently she is a member of the Healthy People 2020 Health Literacy/Health Communication Section and serves as a health literacy advisor to the FDA.
Dr. Davis chaired Louisiana’s statewide Health Literacy Task Force, the first legislatively mandated health literacy group in the nation. She received the Louisiana Public Health Association’s Founders Award for Significant Achievement in Public Health Research. As director of the Doctor/Patient Communication course at LSUHSC-S and as a frequent speaker at national conferences, she has integrated her research findings into practical lessons for providers and health care administrators and policy makers.
Dr. Davis is Principal Investigator (PI) on a 5 year NCI funded health literacy intervention to increase regular breast and CRC screening among patients in Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). She is also working with investigators at Northwestern, Emory and Harvard on AHRQ funded studies to improve patient understanding and actual use of prescription medication labels in English and Spanish. Along with researchers at LSUHSC-S and a team from the University of North Carolina and University of California-San Francisco she has been funded by the ACP-F to develop and test practical self-management guides and videos for patients with diabetes, COPD, and coronary artery disease. ACP-F has distributed over a million copies of these guides.