Eberlin Kyle R, Vargas Christina R, Chuang Danielle J, Lee Bernard T
Division of Plastic Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA.
Division of Plastic Surgery, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA.
Hand (N Y). 2015 Sep;10(3):374-80. doi: 10.1007/s11552-014-9718-7.
The National Institutes of Health and American Medical Association recommend a sixth grade reading level for patient-directed content. This study aims to quantitatively evaluate the readability of the most commonly used resources for surgical treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome.
A web search for "carpal tunnel surgery" was performed using an Internet search engine, and the 13 most popular sites were identified. Relevant, patient-directed articles immediately accessible from the main site were downloaded and formatted into plain text. A total of 102 articles were assessed for readability using ten established analyses: first overall, then by website for comparison.
Patient information about carpal tunnel surgery had an overall average reading level of 13.1. Secondary analysis by website revealed a range of mean readability from 10.8 (high school sophomore level) to 15.3 (university junior level). All sites exceeded the recommended sixth grade reading level.
Online patient resources for carpal tunnel surgery uniformly exceed the recommended reading level. These are too difficult to be understood by a large portion of American adults. A better understanding of readability may be useful in tailoring more appropriate resources for average patient literacy.
美国国立卫生研究院和美国医学协会建议患者指导内容的阅读水平为六年级。本研究旨在定量评估腕管综合征手术治疗最常用资源的可读性。
使用互联网搜索引擎对“腕管手术”进行网络搜索，确定了13个最受欢迎的网站。从主网站可立即获取的相关患者指导文章被下载并格式化为纯文本。使用十种既定分析方法对总共102篇文章的可读性进行评估：首先是总体评估，然后按网站进行比较。
关于腕管手术的患者信息总体平均阅读水平为13.1。按网站进行的二次分析显示，平均可读性范围为10.8（高中二年级水平）至15.3（大学三年级水平）。所有网站均超过了建议的六年级阅读水平。
腕管手术的在线患者资源普遍超过了建议的阅读水平。这些内容对于很大一部分美国成年人来说太难理解。更好地理解可读性可能有助于为普通患者文化水平量身定制更合适的资源。
