Individual Factors That Affect Laypeople's Understanding of Definitions of Medical Jargon.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Patients have difficulty understanding medical jargon in electronic health record (EHR) notes. Lay definitions can improve patient comprehension, which is the goal of the NoteAid project. We assess whether the NoteAid definitions are understandable to laypeople and whether understandability differs with respect to layperson characteristics.

Methods

Definitions for jargon terms were written for laypersons with a 4th-to-7th-grade reading level. 300 definitions were randomly sampled from a corpus of approximately 30,000 definitions. 280 laypeople (crowdsource workers) were recruited; each layperson rated the understandability of 20 definitions. Understandability was rated on a 5-point scale. Using a generalized estimating equation model (GEE) we analyzed the relations

SUBMITTER: Levy DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11618823 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature