Creating Consumer Friendly Health Content: Implementing and Testing a Readability Diagnosis and Enhancement Tool
Joshua Proulx, Sasikiran Kandula, Brent Hill, Qing Zeng‐Treitler · 2013
In the era of patient centered care, creating consumer friendly health content is an important task. Manual content development is labor intensive and could benefit from a readability assessment and enhancement tool. Building on our prior work, we developed and evaluated such a tool called ReDE. In testing, a clinician was asked to use the tool to simplify ten full-length medical documents with 9573 words. In order to assess inter-rater agreement, a second clinician simplified four of the ten documents. The results show that 77% of the clinicians' revisions were for concepts identified as difficult by ReDE, which validates the readability assessment made by the tool. However, a much smaller percentage (33%) of the ReDE suggested replacements were accepted by either of the clinicians which indicates further improvement is warranted.