Improving radiology reports for readability

With highly complex medical documents greatly mismatched with patient literacy levels, a team of researchers set out to test a simplified “grade vs. length” readability metric developed based on results from factor analysis of 10 readability metrics applied to more than 500,000 radiology reports.

Lead author Wei Chen, PhD, of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and his team published their findings in Springer Link. They hypothesized that writing styles may be evaluated using an objective two-dimensional measure and by training radiologists, it could improve their writing styles. 

“While improving radiology reports for readability is a longstanding concern, few articles objectively measure the effectiveness of physician training for readability improvement,” wrote the authors.

Researchers tested how effective writing styles were short term, before and after the writing training of ultrasound reports. From their data, they found a significant improvement with writing styles after training.

“Although the degree of improvement varied for different measures, it is evident that targeted training could provide potential benefits to improve readability due to our statistically significant results,” Chen et al. “The simplified grade vs. length metric enables future clinical decision support systems to quantitatively guide physicians to improve writing styles through writing workshops.”