Readability of Patient Education Materials Available at the Point of Care

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

“…These are novel and significant contributions, as no previous work has systematically analysed the influence of the components in this study and we show that these greatly influence retrieval effectiveness and thus delivery of relevant and understandable health advice. [15,16,17,18], which is the level suggested by NIH for health information on the Web [19]. The distribution for HON is similar to that of the baseline used in this article (BM25).…”

“…For example, Becker reported that the majority of health Web sites are not well designed for the elderly [21], while Stossel et al found that health education material on the Web is not written at an adequate reading level [18]. Zheng and Yu have reported on the readability of electronic health records compared to Wikipedia pages related to diabetes and found that readability measures often do not align with user ratings of readability [22].…”

“…These measures generally rely on surface-level characteristics of text, such as characters, syllables and word counts (missing citation). While these measures have been widely used in studies investigating the understandability of health content retrieved by search engines (e.g., [4,5,6,7,8,9,18,21]), our preliminary work found that these measures are heavily affected by the methods used to extract text from the HTML source [13]. We were able to identify specific settings of an HTML preprocessing pipeline that provided consistent estimates, but due to the lack of human assessments, we were not able to investigate how well each HTML preprocessing pipeline correlated with human assessments.…”

Readability of Educational Materials to Support Parent Sexual Communication With Their Children and Adolescents

“…While readability scores do not assess the quality of a document's content, layout, or style, they do provide insight into how well textual information will be understood by the consumer (Redish, 2000). Smith, 1991;Ridpath, Greene, & Wiese, 2007;Rosales, 2010;Stossel, Gliatto, Fallar & Karani, 2012). These indices have been demonstrated to have good validity and have been extensively used in assessing the readability of health information (Freda, Damus & Merkatz, 1999;Friedman & Hoffman-Goetz, 2006;Kim et al, 2007;Meade & Smith, 1991).…”

Health Literacy in Transitions of Care: An Innovative Objective Structured Clinical Examination for Fourth-Year Medical Students in an Internship Preparation Course

“…The average score among all students across readability tests was a tenth grade reading level (range, grades 7-16). [25][26][27][28] On average, the written discharge instructions of students who completed the workshop before the OSCE were at a grade reading level of 9.9, versus 10.6 among those who completed it after the OSCE (effect size 0.7, p=0.01).…”