Mandating A Sixth Grade Level For Patient Education Material Is All Wrong
The solution is to leverage technology to match capability with content to optimize engagement and learning.
There’s a rule out there. Educational material for patients should be written on a sixth-grade level to be understandable for the average patient. Of course, that seeks to find a common denominator so that the material can be appropriate to a wide range group of people. It certainly makes sense. And it’s not just a suggestion, but more of a mandate that lives across medicine and the pharmaceutical and device industries. Yet, despite these efforts, the reading levels of much online material remain above this threshold. So the medical industry is inclined to lower that level. In other words, dumb it down.
Despite recommendations for patient health information to be written at grade 6–7 reading level, our examination of online educational materials about 9 common internal medicine diagnoses revealed reading levels significantly above the NIH recommendation. This was seen across both diagnosis-specific and general Web sites.
However, this may not necessarily be the best approach and feels hopelessly associated with the patient pamphlets of yesterday. Seeking a sixth-grade level satisfies an intellectual construct, but fails to provide a solution that accommodates the unique needs, interests and educational backgrounds of very few. Simply put, trying to be all things to all people ends up being nothing to no one.
Today’s technology including artificial intelligence (AI) can customize medical education material for very specific ages and backgrounds. This means that patients can receive information that is tailored to their needs and abilities, rather than being forced to read material that may be too difficult or simplistic. An engineer might like graphs and statistics while a different and less educated demographic might prefer a much more simple use of pictures and language.
With the help of platforms like GPT and ChatGPT, medical professionals and educators can now create tailored patient education material that is specific to the needs and abilities of the individual. Further, AI-based image generation by platforms like DALL-E 2 can create highly specific and unique are that may appeal to a specific patient. While it still might be difficult logistically and the learning curve is still high for many potential users, the creation of custom education material — words and images — represent a new group of tools that can shift the objective from a “generic middle” to a powerful and engaging presentation that is uniquely suited to a specific reader. In fact, an early patient profile or history can provide a template that can be useful in crafting these techno-documents.
By leveraging technology, medical professionals can help ensure that more patients, families, and caregivers can understand and learn from educational materials that are often handed out and ignored. This fundamentally changes the direction of education from “dumb it down” to “smarten it up” and fulfills the idea that information is power, clinical power.
