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Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation
Health literacy is emerging as an important factor for medical outcomes as more patients turn to the internet for information about their disease. However educational materials on complex conditions such as atrial fibrillation tend to still be esoteric and result in compromised patient autonomy. We...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Cureus
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7552109/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33062517 http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.10397 |
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author | Siddiqui, Emaad Shah, Aakash M Sambol, Justin Waller, Alfonso H |
author_facet | Siddiqui, Emaad Shah, Aakash M Sambol, Justin Waller, Alfonso H |
author_sort | Siddiqui, Emaad |
collection | PubMed |
description | Health literacy is emerging as an important factor for medical outcomes as more patients turn to the internet for information about their disease. However educational materials on complex conditions such as atrial fibrillation tend to still be esoteric and result in compromised patient autonomy. We add to the current literature by examining the reading level of websites of major healthcare intuitions and general medicine websites. An online Google search using the term “atrial fibrillation” was used to collect patient educational material from the first 20 academic health institutions (AHI) and 20 non-affiliated general medicine websites (GMW). The materials were assessed for readability using nine (9) tests from the analysis software Readability Studio (Oleander Software Solutions Ltd., Maharashtra, India). The patient education materials from the AHI and GMW websites were written at a college freshman reading grade level (13.050 ± 0.845) and high school junior year reading level (11.64 ± 0.789) respectively. The GMW tend to have a wider range of readability levels, and many were scored at the 6th-grade level. In conclusion, the readability levels of patient education materials on atrial fibrillation from both the AHI and GMW are well above the 6th-grade level recommended by the NIH and AMA, posing a risk to the patients’ understanding of the materials. The high readability scores found across all websites and the differences between the groups have been attributed to the various goals and target audiences of the material. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7552109 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Cureus |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-75521092020-10-13 Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation Siddiqui, Emaad Shah, Aakash M Sambol, Justin Waller, Alfonso H Cureus Cardiology Health literacy is emerging as an important factor for medical outcomes as more patients turn to the internet for information about their disease. However educational materials on complex conditions such as atrial fibrillation tend to still be esoteric and result in compromised patient autonomy. We add to the current literature by examining the reading level of websites of major healthcare intuitions and general medicine websites. An online Google search using the term “atrial fibrillation” was used to collect patient educational material from the first 20 academic health institutions (AHI) and 20 non-affiliated general medicine websites (GMW). The materials were assessed for readability using nine (9) tests from the analysis software Readability Studio (Oleander Software Solutions Ltd., Maharashtra, India). The patient education materials from the AHI and GMW websites were written at a college freshman reading grade level (13.050 ± 0.845) and high school junior year reading level (11.64 ± 0.789) respectively. The GMW tend to have a wider range of readability levels, and many were scored at the 6th-grade level. In conclusion, the readability levels of patient education materials on atrial fibrillation from both the AHI and GMW are well above the 6th-grade level recommended by the NIH and AMA, posing a risk to the patients’ understanding of the materials. The high readability scores found across all websites and the differences between the groups have been attributed to the various goals and target audiences of the material. Cureus 2020-09-11 /pmc/articles/PMC7552109/ /pubmed/33062517 http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.10397 Text en Copyright © 2020, Siddiqui et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Cardiology Siddiqui, Emaad Shah, Aakash M Sambol, Justin Waller, Alfonso H Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation |
title | Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation |
title_full | Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation |
title_fullStr | Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation |
title_full_unstemmed | Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation |
title_short | Readability Assessment of Online Patient Education Materials on Atrial Fibrillation |
title_sort | readability assessment of online patient education materials on atrial fibrillation |
topic | Cardiology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7552109/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33062517 http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.10397 |
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