Readability Assessment of Patient Education Materials from the American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery Foundation

Abstract

Online patient education materials on the AAO-HNSF Web site are written above the recommended 6th grade level and may need to be revised to make them more easily understood by a broader audience.

Are We Effectively Informing Patients? A Quantitative Analysis of On-Line Patient Education Resources from the American Society of Neuroradiology

“…These discrepancies in content versus intent are not a new phenomenon inasmuch as other Web sites have been shown to have a disjunction between the level of complexity of their patient education materials and the ability of the average reader to understand them. [13][14][15]20,[23][24][25] A recent article from JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that 16 major national physician organizations had Web sites that presented patient education materials above the AMA and National Institutes of Health guidelines. 22 That study did note that one organization had marginally acceptable levels of readability of their resources (American Academy of Family Physicians), meeting the AMA and the National Institutes of Health guidelines on some but not all readability scales.…”

“…5,11 Despite these guidelines, many of the Web sites of several national physician organizations, including medical, surgical, and subspecialty fields, have provided texts at a level too complex for most of the public to comprehend. [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Recent reports that evaluate the readability of patient education resources on radiology Web sites, sponsored by major organizations such as the Radiological Society of North America, the American College of Radiology, the Society of Interventional Radiology, and the Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiologic Society of Europe, demonstrated that the material offered to the public is written at a level well above the AMA and the National Institutes of Health recommendations. 24,25 In this study, we investigated the level of readability of all patient education resources on the American Society of Neuroradiology (ASNR) Web site by using a variety of quantitative readability-assessment scales.…”

Readability Assessment of Patient Education Material Published by German-Speaking Associations of Urology

“…Considering the complexity of medical themes and, for example, a restricted reading ability in about 15 % of adults in Germany [6], it is important to provide information that is easy to access, read and comprehend [7,8]. Several studies have investigated the readability of PEM in different fields of medicine [9,10]. Urological [11,12] and non-urological [13] trials concluded that the readability of English written information material was more difficult than the level of difficulty recommended by the American Medical Association [14] and National Institutes of Health (NIH) [15].…”

The Readability of Online Patient Education Materials from Major Anesthesiology Associations and the American Society of Anesthesiologists

“…A number of studies [7][8][9][10][24][25][26][27][28][29] have shown that PEMs across numerous fields of medicine are written well above the AMA recommended 6 th grade reading level. However, this benchmark of a 6 th grade reading level may be misleading.…”

“…Most websites are providing patient information written at a level too advanced to be of educational value [7][8][9]. The importance of our patients' ability to understand their physicians is emphasized by the correlation between health outcome and health literacy.…”