Healthcare Literacy is defined as ability to obtain, process, and act on health information in everyday situations for managing illness, preventing diseases and using healthcare services. Usage of healthcare services is further expanded to knowing when and where to seek care, understand and comprehend what a professional is explaining and adhering to guidelines for medication schedules and/or lifestyle advice.

There are three progressive levels defining healthcare literacy.

1.        Functional: Basic reading and understanding

2.        Interactive: Communicating and asking questions

3.        Critical: Analyzing and making informed choices

Lower level of healthcare literacy is evidenced with

1.        Poorer health outcomes

2.        Lower care to family members

3.        Higher use or emergency care and hospitalizations

4.        Poor management of chronic disease

Higher level of healthcare literacy drives

1.        Better preventive care

2.        Informed and empowered partner in decision-making with professionals (healthcare, insurance providers)

At a national level, the impact of a health event is measured and reported by metrics such as DALYs – Disability Adjusted Life Years

 DALYs = Years of Life Lost (YLL) + Years of Life with disability (YLD)

YLL -> pre-mature mortality

YLD -> non-fatal health loss

One DALY = One year of healthy life lost.

 So more DALYs = more lost productivity and higher national and per capita cost.

One of the methods for cost estimation is Human Capital Approach (HCA)

 Cost = DALYs x GDP/capita X LFP x (1-Health spend fraction)

For India, the parameters that are widely accepted in the above calculation are

LFP – Labor Force Participation: ~0.4

Health Spend Fraction ~ 0.03

The health spends estimated aggregates across government, out-of-pocket and prepaid private), and development assistance for health for India (forecast) is indicated below. There is an increase of spend forecasted for the next 24 years with both the aggregated spend and Out of Pocket (OOP) spend showing an increase.

Citation: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Global Expected Health Spending 2023-2050. Seattle, United States of America: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), 2025.

While this cost sounds staggering at a national level, let’s look at the impact at a family level.

Considering a family of 4 with 2 earning members (adults) and 2 dependents (child, elderly parent), loss of 1 earner’s productivity

1.        Halves income

2.        Medical Out of pocket (OOP) expenses increase by around 14-27% of income

3.        33% productivity loss of family due to caregiving

 An explosion of digital medical devices and emerging evidence from trials and observational studies suggest that DALYs – and therefore costs - can be reduced by tracking, understanding and acting on:

1.        Physical activity

2.        Physiological parameters

3.        Sleep duration and quality

4.        Mental Health

 A Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) providing real-time glucose data via sensors, enables users to track patterns and link these patterns to diet, exercise and lifestyle. This empowers functional literacy (reading trends), interactive literacy (discussing data with care providers), and critical literacy (analyzing impacts for decisions). In diabetes management, CGMs have shown to boost self-efficacy, adherence, and outcomes, reducing DALYs and eventually healthcare spends through preventive insights.

Health literacy, DALYs and digital biomarkers together signal a clear, urgent shift: building preventive skills into everyday life. As digital tools like CGMs and other biomarkers turn abstract risks into tangible daily feedback, they can turn citizens into critical partners in care, bending the DALY curve and transforming a rising national cost into an investment in healthier, more productive years of life.