Readability Formulas and User Perceptions of Electronic Health Records Difficulty: A Corpus Study
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Quantitative Health SciencesDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2017-03-02Keywords
electronic health recordspatients
readability
Health and Medical Administration
Health Communication
Health Information Technology
Health Services Administration
Information Literacy
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BACKGROUND: Electronic health records (EHRs) are a rich resource for developing applications to engage patients and foster patient activation, thus holding a strong potential to enhance patient-centered care. Studies have shown that providing patients with access to their own EHR notes may improve the understanding of their own clinical conditions and treatments, leading to improved health care outcomes. However, the highly technical language in EHR notes impedes patients' comprehension. Numerous studies have evaluated the difficulty of health-related text using readability formulas such as Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), and Gunning-Fog Index (GFI). They conclude that the materials are often written at a grade level higher than common recommendations. OBJECTIVE: The objective of our study was to explore the relationship between the aforementioned readability formulas and the laypeople's perceived difficulty on 2 genres of text: general health information and EHR notes. We also validated the formulas' appropriateness and generalizability on predicting difficulty levels of highly complex technical documents. METHODS: We collected 140 Wikipedia articles on diabetes and 242 EHR notes with diabetes International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision code. We recruited 15 Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) users to rate difficulty levels of the documents. Correlations between laypeople's perceived difficulty levels and readability formula scores were measured, and their difference was tested. We also compared word usage and the impact of medical concepts of the 2 genres of text. RESULTS: The distributions of both readability formulas' scores (P < .001) and laypeople's perceptions (P=.002) on the 2 genres were different. Correlations of readability predictions and laypeople's perceptions were weak. Furthermore, despite being graded at similar levels, documents of different genres were still perceived with different difficulty (P < .001). Word usage in the 2 related genres still differed significantly (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggested that the readability formulas' predictions did not align with perceived difficulty in either text genre. The widely used readability formulas were highly correlated with each other but did not show adequate correlation with readers' perceived difficulty. Therefore, they were not appropriate to assess the readability of EHR notes.Source
J Med Internet Res. 2017 Mar 2;19(3):e59. doi: 10.2196/jmir.6962. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.2196/jmir.6962Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/40322PubMed ID
28254738Related Resources
Rights
Copyright ©Jiaping Zheng, Hong Yu. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 02.03.2017. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.2196/jmir.6962
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