Readability of Hospital Online Patient Education Materials Across Otolaryngology Specialties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: This study evaluates the readability of online patient education materials (OPEMs) across otolaryngology subspecialties, hospital characteristics, and national otolaryngology organizations, while assessing AI alternatives. Methods: Hospitals from the US News Best ENT list were queried for OPEMs describing a chosen surgery per subspecialty; the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AAO), American Laryngological Association (ALA), Ear, Nose, and Throat United Kingdom (ENTUK), and the Canadian Society of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (CSOHNS) were similarly queried. Google was queried for the top 10 links from hospitals per procedure. Ownership (private/public), presence of respective otolaryngology fellowships, region, and median household income (zip code) were collected. Readability was assessed using seven indices and averaged: Automated Readability Index (ARI), Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Gunning Fog Readability (GFR), Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), Coleman-Liau Readability Index (CLRI), and Linsear Write Readability Formula (LWRF). AI-generated materials from ChatGPT were compared for readability, accuracy, content, and tone. Analyses were conducted between subspecialties, against national organizations, NIH standard, and across demographic variables. Results: = 0.005). ChatGPT-generated materials averaged a 6.8-grade level, demonstrating improved readability, especially with specialized prompting, compared to all hospital and organization OPEMs. Conclusion: OPEMs from all sources exceed the NIH readability standard. ENTUK serves as a benchmark for accessible language, while ChatGPT demonstrates the feasibility of producing more readable content. Otolaryngologists might consider using ChatGPT to generate patient-friendly materials, with caution, and advocate for national-level improvements in patient education readability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".