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Lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources

BACKGROUND: Lung cancer screening can reduce mortality but can be a complex, multi-step process. Poor health literacy is associated with unfavorable outcomes and decreased use of preventative services, so it is important to address barriers to care through efficient and practical education. The read...

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Autores principales: Haas, Kevin, Brillante, Christie, Sharp, Lisa, Elzokaky, Ahmed K., Pasquinelli, Mary, Feldman, Lawrence, Kovitz, Kevin L., Joo, Min
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6286598/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30526544
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-6278-8
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author Haas, Kevin
Brillante, Christie
Sharp, Lisa
Elzokaky, Ahmed K.
Pasquinelli, Mary
Feldman, Lawrence
Kovitz, Kevin L.
Joo, Min
author_facet Haas, Kevin
Brillante, Christie
Sharp, Lisa
Elzokaky, Ahmed K.
Pasquinelli, Mary
Feldman, Lawrence
Kovitz, Kevin L.
Joo, Min
author_sort Haas, Kevin
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Lung cancer screening can reduce mortality but can be a complex, multi-step process. Poor health literacy is associated with unfavorable outcomes and decreased use of preventative services, so it is important to address barriers to care through efficient and practical education. The readability of lung cancer screening materials for patients is unknown and may not be at the recommended 6th grade reading level set by the American Medical Association. Our goals were to: (1) measure the health literacy of a lung cancer screening population from an urban academic medical center, and (2) examine the readability of online educational materials for lung cancer screening. METHODS: We performed a retrospective cross sectional study at a single urban academic center. Health literacy was assessed using three validated screening questions. To assess the readability of educational materials, we performed a Google search using the phrase, “What is lung cancer screening?” and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) formula was used to estimate the grade level required to understand the text. RESULTS: There were 404 patients who underwent lung cancer screening during the study period. The prevalence of inadequate/marginal health literacy was 26.7–38.0%. Fifty websites were reviewed and four were excluded from analysis because they were intended for medical providers. The mean FKGL for the 46 websites combined was 10.6 ± 2.2. CONCLUSIONS: Low health literacy was common and is likely a barrier to appropriate education for lung cancer screening. The current online educational materials regarding lung cancer screening are written above the recommended reading level set by the American Medical Association.
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spelling pubmed-62865982018-12-14 Lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources Haas, Kevin Brillante, Christie Sharp, Lisa Elzokaky, Ahmed K. Pasquinelli, Mary Feldman, Lawrence Kovitz, Kevin L. Joo, Min BMC Public Health Research Article BACKGROUND: Lung cancer screening can reduce mortality but can be a complex, multi-step process. Poor health literacy is associated with unfavorable outcomes and decreased use of preventative services, so it is important to address barriers to care through efficient and practical education. The readability of lung cancer screening materials for patients is unknown and may not be at the recommended 6th grade reading level set by the American Medical Association. Our goals were to: (1) measure the health literacy of a lung cancer screening population from an urban academic medical center, and (2) examine the readability of online educational materials for lung cancer screening. METHODS: We performed a retrospective cross sectional study at a single urban academic center. Health literacy was assessed using three validated screening questions. To assess the readability of educational materials, we performed a Google search using the phrase, “What is lung cancer screening?” and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) formula was used to estimate the grade level required to understand the text. RESULTS: There were 404 patients who underwent lung cancer screening during the study period. The prevalence of inadequate/marginal health literacy was 26.7–38.0%. Fifty websites were reviewed and four were excluded from analysis because they were intended for medical providers. The mean FKGL for the 46 websites combined was 10.6 ± 2.2. CONCLUSIONS: Low health literacy was common and is likely a barrier to appropriate education for lung cancer screening. The current online educational materials regarding lung cancer screening are written above the recommended reading level set by the American Medical Association. BioMed Central 2018-12-07 /pmc/articles/PMC6286598/ /pubmed/30526544 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-6278-8 Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Haas, Kevin
Brillante, Christie
Sharp, Lisa
Elzokaky, Ahmed K.
Pasquinelli, Mary
Feldman, Lawrence
Kovitz, Kevin L.
Joo, Min
Lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources
title Lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources
title_full Lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources
title_fullStr Lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources
title_full_unstemmed Lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources
title_short Lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources
title_sort lung cancer screening: assessment of health literacy and readability of online educational resources
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6286598/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30526544
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-6278-8
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