Title: Librarians and Patient Education: A Tale of Two Experiences
In this session, a clinical information librarian whose primary interaction with patient education materials is in their creation, storage, and accessibility to hospital staff will share her experience leading the hospital Patient Education and Health Literacy committee. The second experience will be shared by a librarian who is a health education coordinator in a patient-facing health education center. She will highlight her work with both the creation of patient education materials at her health system as well as her daily interactions with patients around their health information and education needs.
Bios:
Michelle Bass, PhD, MSI, AHIP-D is the Clinical Information Librarian at Pennsylvania Hospital. Before starting her journey in hospital librarianship in August 2022, she worked in academic health science libraries across the United States. She earned her Health Literacy Specialist Certificate and PlainLanguage Pro Skill Building Course Certification from the Institute for Healthcare Advancements in March 2023 and March 2025, respectively. Michelle served as the chair of the hospital’s patient education and health literacy committee from July 2023 to June 2026 and maintains her position as an active committee member. In July 2026, she began her service as a co-chair of the Penn Medicine Health Literacy Collaborative, a team of health care professionals from across the seven Penn Medicine hospitals working together to support Penn Medicine’s journey to being a health literate organization and providing the most up-to-date and evidence-based practice informed patient education solutions.
Abby Thorne, MSLS is the Health Education Coordinator (medical librarian) for University of Kentucky HealthCare’s Don and Cathy Jacobs Health Education Centers, a role she has held for 12 years. She oversees two patient education libraries and provides consumer health and patient education resources to staff, patients, and visitors throughout the UK HealthCare enterprise. Abby holds a Level II Consumer Health Information Specialization (CHIS) from the Medical Library Association. She was named a Fellow of the Special Libraries Association (now part of the Association for Information Science & Technology) in 2025.