What if clinical trial participation is less about recruitment and more about trust, access, and what has to happen before someone is ever ready to say yes?

In this episode of Health Literacy IRL, host Megan Freeland, PharmD talks with Tiffany Whitlow, Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer at Acclinate, about the real-world barriers that shape who gets to participate in clinical research. Together, they explore why participation starts long before a consent form — and why community engagement, trusted relationships, and better system design matter so much.

In this episode:

• Why recruitment is an incomplete frame for inclusive research
• What real-life barriers affect participation long before consent
• How Acclinate approaches trust-building through community engagement
• What Tiffany sees ahead for the future of clinical research

Connect with Tiffany and Megan on LinkedIn, and Tiffany on Instagram.

What does it look like to operationalize health literacy inside a large academic medical center?

In this episode of Health Literacy IRL, host Megan Freeland, PharmD talks with Katie Leath, MPH, MA, Director of the Center for Health Literacy at UAMS, about how health literacy can move from a side project to an embedded organizational priority. Katie shares how her team supports patient education, plain language, translation, training, and research communication across UAMS and beyond.

In this episode:

• Why health literacy is often misunderstood
• What organizational health literacy looks like in practice
• How UAMS’s center supports internal and external partners
• What institutions need to make health literacy part of how they operate

Connect with Katie and Megan on LinkedIn.

What if the greatest problem isn't that patients don't understand health information — but that we're handing them too much information under too much pressure, with no tools to process it.

In this solo episode of Health Literacy IRL, host Megan Freeland, PharmD explores why healthcare marketing, health communications, health literacy, and patient experience teams need to stop operating in silos — and start building cohesively around the patient journey.

She also elaborates on an uncomfortable and inconvenient truth: that providing more information isn't always the solution. And the system — not the patient — is largely to blame.

In this episode:

• Why siloed teams fall short of patients' needs
• A mouth-watering analogy that reframes information overload
• What patients face during high-stakes medical decision-making
• The largely untapped opportunity for organizations to map health information to the patient journey

Connect with Megan on LinkedIn.