Creating Consumer Friendly Health Content: Implementing and Testing a Readability Diagnosis and Enhancement Tool

In the era of patient centered care, creating consumer friendly health content is an important task. Manual content development is labor intensive and could benefit from a readability assessment and enhancement tool. Building on our prior work, we developed and evaluated such a tool called ReDE. In testing, a clinician was asked to use the tool to simplify ten full-length medical documents with 9573 words. In order to assess inter-rater agreement, a second clinician simplified four of the ten documents. The results show that 77% of the clinicians´ revisions were for concepts identified as difficult by ReDE, which validates the readability assessment made by the tool. However, a much smaller percentage (33%) of the ReDE suggested replacements were accepted by either of the clinicians which indicates further improvement is warranted.