Readability of Healthcare Literature for Gastroparesis and Evaluation of Medical Terminology in Reading Difficulty

Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation

Health literacy is emerging as an important factor for medical outcomes as more patients turn to the internet for information about their disease. However educational materials on complex conditions such as atrial fibrillation tend to still be esoteric and result in compromised patient autonomy. We add to the current literature by examining the reading level of websites of major healthcare intuitions and general medicine websites. An online Google search using the term "atrial fibrillation" was used to collect patient educational material from the first 20 academic health institutions (AHI) and 20 non-affiliated general medicine websites (GMW). The materials were assessed for readability using nine (9) tests from the analysis software Readability Studio (Oleander Software Solutions Ltd., Maharashtra, India). The patient education materials from the AHI and GMW websites were written at a college freshman reading grade level (13.050 ± 0.845) and high school junior year reading level (11.64 ± 0.789) respectively. The GMW tend to have a wider range of readability levels, and many were scored at the 6th-grade level. In conclusion, the readability levels of patient education materials on atrial fibrillation from both the AHI and GMW are well above the 6th-grade level recommended by the NIH and AMA, posing a risk to the patients' understanding of the materials. The high readability scores found across all websites and the differences between the groups have been attributed to the various goals and target audiences of the material.

Readability of Patient Educational Materials in English Versus Arabic

Little research has been done about patient educational materials (PEMs) written in Arabic. Readability of Arabic PEMs has not previously been assessed because, until recently, there was no validated Arabic readability assessment tool. A total of 207 PEMs in both Arabic and English were collected from the Medline Plus portal. Readability was assessed using Flesch-Kincaid in English and the Open Source Metric for Measuring Arabic Narratives, a new Arabic readability test. We also examined Arabic documents for other linguistic features that could lead to confusion. Mean readability grades were 6.1 and 7.1 for Arabic and English, respectively (p < .01). In 31.6% of PEMs, the English text was higher by two or more grades than the Arabic text, and the Arabic text was higher by two or more grades than the English text in 3.8% of PEMs. No diacritical marks in Arabic were used. An array of esoteric Arabic medical terms, transliterated English terms, Arabicized English terms, and written versions of spoken Arabic dialects were used. [HLRP: Health Literacy Research and Practice. 2019;3(3):e170-e173.].

A Linguistic Model of Communication Types in Palliative Medicine: Effects of Multidrug-Resistant Organisms Colonization or Infection and Isolation Measures in End of Life on Family Caregivers' Knowledge, Attitude, and Practices

Background: This study examines communication profiles and associated attitudes toward health care professionals in interviews with family caregivers of hospitalized patients with confirmed multidrug-resistant organisms (e.g., methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or multiresistant gram-negative bacteria) diagnosis at the end of life. Objectives: This study aims to replicate and complement findings from a previous investigation using a different methodological framework. The benefits of linguistic research in medical contexts are highlighted. Design: Fifty interviews with family caregivers were analyzed linguistically. The considered parameters include lexical choices such as evaluative wording, metaphors, and specialized terminology, as well as higher level categories-turn-taking, sentence-length, and personal deixis. These characteristics serve to assess attitudes toward medical staff, hygiene measures, knowledge, and its transfer and general emotional states. Conclusions: Linguistic expertise adds benefits to the classical analysis of language data as used in social sciences. Family caregivers' linguistic and attitudinal profiles vary depending on whether their involvement in the overall situation is active or passive, and whether their relationship toward staff and hospital is cooperative or confrontative. Depending on the four possible combinations of those characteristics, different recommendations for communication strategies on the staff's side can be given. In all cases, clear and patient/family centeredness are considered beneficial.

Consumer Health Search on the Web: Study of Web Page Understandability and Its Integration in Ranking Algorithms

BACKGROUND

Understandability plays a key role in ensuring that people accessing health information are capable of gaining insights that can assist them with their health concerns and choices. The access to unclear or misleading information has been shown to negatively impact the health decisions of the general public.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to investigate methods to estimate the understandability of health Web pages and use these to improve the retrieval of information for people seeking health advice on the Web.

METHODS

Our investigation considered methods to automatically estimate the understandability of health information in Web pages, and it provided a thorough evaluation of these methods using human assessments as well as an analysis of preprocessing factors affecting understandability estimations and associated pitfalls. Furthermore, lessons learned for estimating Web page understandability were applied to the construction of retrieval methods, with specific attention to retrieving information understandable by the general public.

RESULTS

We found that machine learning techniques were more suitable to estimate health Web page understandability than traditional readability formulae, which are often used as guidelines and benchmark by health information providers on the Web (larger difference found for Pearson correlation of .602 using gradient boosting regressor compared with .438 using Simple Measure of Gobbledygook Index with the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum eHealth 2015 collection).

CONCLUSIONS

The findings reported in this paper are important for specialized search services tailored to support the general public in seeking health advice on the Web, as they document and empirically validate state-of-the-art techniques and settings for this domain application.