Evaluation of lexical clarification by patients reading their clinical notes: a quasi-experimental interview study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Patients benefit from access to their medical records. However, clinical notes and letters are often difficult to comprehend for most lay people. Therefore, functionality was implemented in the patient portal of a Dutch university medical centre (UMC) to clarify medical terms in free-text data. The clarifications consisted of synonyms and definitions from a Dutch medical terminology system. We aimed to evaluate to what extent these lexical clarifications match the information needs of the patients. Secondarily, we evaluated how the clarifications and the functionality could be improved.

Methods

We invited participants from the patient panel of the UMC to read their own clinical notes. They marked terms they found difficult and rated the ease of these terms. After

SUBMITTER: van Mens HJT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7737248 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature