10 Patient empowerment via technologies for patient-friendly personalized language

Abstract

Free-text reports are used in health care to transfer information between working shifts and sites. This text, written by a physician, nurse, specialist, ward secretary or other healthcare worker, is full of jargon, idioms and shorthand that patients find difficult to understand. If patients are to be empowered to take an active role and make informed decisions in their health care, they need support for understanding these reports. This chapter discusses language technologies as a way to provide support for patients to better understand free-text reports with difficult clinical language. This includes expanding shorthand, replacing words with patient-centric terms, providing term definitions, hyperlinking to further information on patientfriendly and reliable sites on the internet , and personalizing medication advice and other content. To conclude, statistical evaluations and benchmarks in shared tasks give evidence of language technologies being successful in making text easier to understand and better personalized. Moreover, electronic health record s that both patients and clinicians use to read, write and share information are becoming more commonplace and provide a platform for language technologies to assist patients in reading free-text reports.

Designing a Patient-Friendly Website for Newly Diagnosed Cancer Patients with the Participatory Health Research Approach

“…We experienced that the acceptance of isPO could be improved, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 42 ]. The notion of improved acceptance through an enhanced understanding of health information is supported by findings from Adnan, Warren and Suominen [ 43 ], which link an improved understanding of health information with the end-users’ empowerment to take a more active role in the decision-making process of the care they receive [ 43 ].…”

Scholarly Influence of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum eHealth Initiative: Review and Bibliometric Study of the 2012 to 2017 Outcomes

“…However, patients, their next of kin, and other laypersons are likely to experience difficulties in understanding the arcane jargon of eHealth records, and improving this readability can contribute to patient empowerment [ 2 ], defined as providing partial control and mastery over health and care which leads to patients having an active role in their health care, making better health/care decisions, being more independent from health care services, and having decreased costs of care [ 3 ]. This could mean replacing jargon words with patient-friendly synonyms, expanding shorthand, and providing an option to see the original text ( Figure 1 ).…”

“…These eHealth records are targeted to both patients and health care workers for reading, writing, and sharing information [ 7 ]. Combined with the aforementioned record processing, this could mean enriching the health record with hyperlinks to term definitions, care guidelines, and other information on patient-friendly and reliable sites on the internet ( Figure 1 ) as one way to facilitate patients in understanding their health and health care [ 2 ].…”

Scholarly Influence of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum eHealth Initiative: Review and Bibliometric Study of the 2012 to 2017 Outcomes (Preprint)

“…However, patients, their next-of-kin, and other laypersons are likely to experience difficulties in understanding the arcane jargon of health records and improving this readability can contribute to patient empowerment [2], defined as providing partial control and mastery over health and care which leads to patients having an active role in their healthcare, making better health/care decisions, being more independent from healthcare services, and having decreased costs of care [3]. This could mean replacing jargon words with patient-friendly synonyms; expanding shorthand; and an option to see the original text ( Figure 2).…”

“…They are becoming increasingly common and have been open, for example, in Australia since 2012. If combined with the aforementioned record processing, this could mean enriching the health record with hyperlinks to term definitions, care guidelines, and other information on patient-friendly and reliable sites on the Internet (Figure 2) as one way to facilitate patients in understanding their health and healthcare; the current de facto approach is the patients themselves searching the disconnected and sometimes unreliable documents across the Internet [2]. This paper reports on the six installations of CLEF eHealth, organised as part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) initiative in 2012-2017.…”