background: hundreds of patient education materials i.e. pamphlets are annually published in healthcare systems following their design, correction, and revision. aim: to design and evaluate patient education pamphlets based on readability indexes and their comparison with literacy level in society. method: the average literacy level among 500 patients admitted to two training hospitals in bojnu...

Current healthcare guidelines identify low health literacy as a major barrier to optimal health communication. Health literacy is defined as the degree to which individuals can obtain, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions. An estimated 90 million people in the U.S. have marginal health literacy. The Institute of Medicine and th...

BACKGROUND Provision of information plays a critical role in supporting patients to be engaged or empowered to be involved with infection prevention measures in hospitals. This explorative study evaluated the suitability, readability and accessibility of information on healthcare associated infections (HCAIs) and infection prevention strategies targeted at patients from the websites of 19 acute...

OBJECTIVES To study whether linguistic analysis and changes in information leaflets can improve readability and understanding. DESIGN Randomised, controlled study. Two information leaflets concerned with trials of drugs for conditions/diseases which are commonly known were modified, and the original was tested against the revised version. SETTING Denmark. PARTICIPANTS 235 persons in the r...

The present paper introduces and evaluates a readability measurement method designed for learners of EFL (English as a foreign language). The proposed readability measurement method (a regression model) estimates the text readability based on linguistic features, such as lexical, syntactic and discourse features. Text readability refers to the comprehension rate of a text (0.0-1.0). The experim...

Readability research has a long and rich tradition, but there has been too little focus on general readability prediction without targeting a specific audience or text genre. Moreover, although NLP-inspired research has focused on adding more complex readability features, there is still no consensus on which features contribute most to the prediction. In this article, we investigate in close de...

INTRODUCTION To assess the readability of informed consent documents (IC) of the different national surgical societies. METHODS During January 2012 we collected 504 IC protocols of different specialties. To calculate readability parameters the following criteria were assessed: number of words, syllables and phrases, syllables/word and word/phrase averages, Word correlation index, Flesch-Szigr...

BACKGROUND State governments provide preprinted advance directive forms to the general public. However, many adults in the United States (US) lack the skills necessary to read and comprehend health care-related materials. In this study, we sought to determine the readability of state government-sponsored advance directive forms. METHODS A cross sectional study design was used. The readability...

In this paper, we present a new approach to ranking that considers the reading ability (and motivation) of the user. Web pages can be, increasingly, badly written with unfamiliar words, poor use of syntax, ambiguous phrases and so on. Readability research suggests that experts and motivated readers may overcome confusingly written text, but nevertheless find it an irritation. We investigate usi...