ArticleStudies in health technology and informatics2013
Applying multiple methods to assess the readability of a large corpus of medical documents.
Article in Studies in health technology and informatics, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sick Day Management Plans for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples With Chronic Kidney Disease on the Cape York Peninsula of Australia: Health Workers' Perspectives.The Australian journal of rural health · 2025Article
- Biomedical text readability after hypernym substitution with fine-tuned large language models.PLOS digital health · 2024Article
- Developing and Testing Automatic Models of Patient Communicative Health Literacy Using Linguistic Features: Findings from the ECLIPPSE study.Health communication · 2021Article
- Predicting the readability of physicians' secure messages to improve health communication using novel linguistic features: Findings from the ECLIPPSE study.Journal of communication in healthcare · 2020Article
- Article
- Assessing the Readability of Freely Available ICU Notes.AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science proceedings. AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science · 2019Article
- Using natural language processing and machine learning to classify health literacy from secure messages: The ECLIPPSE study.PloS one · 2019Article
- Readability of written medicine information materials in Arabic language: expert and consumer evaluation.BMC health services research · 2018Article
- Simplified Readability Metric Drives Improvement of Radiology Reports: an Experiment on Ultrasound Reports at a Pediatric Hospital.Journal of digital imaging · 2017Article
- Assessing the readability of ClinicalTrials.gov.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Medical documents provided to patients at the end of an episode of care, such as discharge summaries and referral letters, serve as an important vehicle to convey critical information to patients and families. Increasingly, healthcare institutions are also experimenting with granting patients direct electronic access to other types of clinical narratives that are not typically shared unless explicitly requested, such as progress notes. While these efforts have great potential to improve information transparency, their value can be severely diminished if patients are unable to read and thus unable to properly interpret the medical documents shared to them. In this study, we approached the problem by contrasting the 'readability' of two types of medical documents: referral letters vs. other genres of narrative clinician notes not explicitly intended for direct viewing by patients. To establish a baseline for comparison, we also computed readability scores of MedlinePlus articles - exemplars of fine patient education materials carefully crafted for lay audiences. We quantified document readability using four different measures. Differences in the results obtained through these measures are also discussed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
23920636PMC5369652What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.