BACKGROUND The use of electronic health record (EHR) systems with patient engagement capabilities, including viewing, downloading, and transmitting health information, has recently grown tremendously. However, using these resources to engage patients in managing their own health remains challenging due to the complex and technical nature of the EHR narratives. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to d...

Since millions seek health information online, it is vital for this information to be comprehensible. Most studies use readability formulas, which ignore vocabulary, and conclude that online health information is too difficult. We developed a vocabularly-based, naïve Bayes classi­ fier to distinguish between three difficulty levels in text. It proved 98% accurate in a 250-document evaluation. W...

There is a need of matching text difficulty to the expected reading skill of the audience. Readability measures were developed with this objective in mind, first by psycholinguists, and more recently, by practitioners of natural language processing. A common strategy was to extract linguistic features that are good predictors of readability, and then train discriminative classification or regre...

We present a generalizable formal model of software readability based on a human study of 5000 participants. Readability is fundamental to maintenance, but remains poorly understood. Previous models focused on symbol counts of small code snippets. By contrast, we approach code as read on screens by humans and propose to analyze visual, spatial and linguistic features, including structural patte...

This study examined the readability of the AANA Journal, quantifying the effect of peer review on case and research reports published from 1992 to 1994. Gunning and Flesch index-based computer analysis, as well as human comparative analysis, was undertaken. Computer and human assessment of readability revealed improvement as papers evolved from submitted to published versions; however, at publi...

A Discharge Summary provides critical information to patients for managing their post-discharge care. This study analyzes the characteristics of a corpus of Electronic Discharge Summaries (EDSs) with respect to content and readability of its sections in terms of text length and grade level complexity, use of abbreviations and noun phrase complexity based on the Open Access Consumer Health Vocab...

Objective:Patient information leaflets (PILs) are widely used to reinforce or illustrate health information and to complement verbal consultation. The objectives of the study were to assess the readability and presentation of PILs published by Allergy UK, and to conduct a longitudinal assessment to evaluate the impact of leaflet amendment and revision on readability. Methods:Readability of Alle...

OBJECTIVE To review studies on the readability of package leaflets of medicinal products for human use. METHODS We conducted a systematic literature review between 2008 and 2013 using the keywords "Readability and Package Leaflet" and "Readability and Package Insert" in the academic search engine Biblioteca do Conhecimento Online, comprising different bibliographic resources/databases. The pref...

We describe a readability assessment approach to support the process of text simplification for poor literacy readers. Given an input text, the goal is to predict its readability level, which corresponds to the literacy level that is expected from the target reader: rudimentary, basic or advanced. We complement features traditionally used for readability assessment with a number of new features...