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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...

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Autores principales: Siddiqui, Emaad, Shah, Aakash M, Sambol, Justin, Waller, Alfonso H
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cureus 2020
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.
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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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