Trial reportBMC health services research2025
Evaluating the impact of easy-to-understand patient letters after discharge on patients' health literacy: a randomized controlled study.
Trial report in BMC health services research, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- MyCODE: a prospective evaluation of lay-language molecular tumor board protocols in precision oncology.The oncologist · 2026Article
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8 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMore than half of the German population has considerable difficulties in understanding health information, reflecting limited health literacy, which is associated with poorer health outcomes. Personalized, automatically generated, easy-to-understand discharge letters (patient letters) are designed to improve patients' comprehension of medical information after hospital discharge. This study investigated whether these letters improve health literacy in cardiologic patients and explored their perceptions.
methodsThis randomized controlled study included 738 patients discharged from a heart center in Dresden, Germany. The control group (CG; n = 375) received a conventional discharge letter only, whereas the intervention group (IG; n = 363) additionally received a software-generated patient letter by post. Five to nine days later, participants received a sociodemographic survey and the HLS-EU-Q16 health literacy questionnaire. IG participants additionally evaluated the patient letter, and n = 15 were interviewed qualitatively to gain deeper insights.
resultsPost-intervention, IG participants had significantly higher health literacy than CG participants (p = .002, Mann-Whitney U test). Over 90% of IG participants rated the patient letter as helpful, comprehensible and informative. Qualitative interviews revealed a largely positive attitude toward patient letters, along with some suggestions for content improvement.
conclusionsPatient letters were associated with higher post-intervention health literacy in cardiologic patients and were well received. These results suggest that broad implementation of patient letters may benefit both patients and healthcare providers by enhancing patients' understanding of medical information regarding diagnoses and treatment, potentially contributing to improved health-related outcomes.
trial registrationThe study was retrospectively registered in the German Clinical Trials Register on December 13, 2024 under the number DRKS00035706.
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