Summary of article 2:
Sanjeev, Badarudeen and Kunju (2008) stated in the article entitled “Readability of
Online Patient Education Materials from the AAOS Website”, that the goal of the website is to
improve the communication between the doctor and he patient, and to provide new and rational
information about the line of surgery and treatment.
The authors first defined the Flesch-Kincaid (FK) grade formula and discussed that as the
FK increases the readability and comprehension of the text will be more difficult. They have also
suggested that unless medical articles are written in the sixth level or less in FK, people will no
longer have the chance to get knowledgeable or alerted about medical aspects.
The materials provided in this article are 426 unique education articles from the AAOS
website database. The FK grade of theses articles could be calculated through a specified
formula that they have used, and the reliability of these articles were also evaluated. Using SAS
software, a statistical analysis was done.
The results of this study showed that 98% of these articles had high FK, and only 2%
were readable, meaning having the recommended FK grade. The authors discussed the
importance of having readable medical information in order to increase the people’s medical
education.
The limitations mentioned in the paper are the weakness of the tools that assessed the FK
level of the articles. Second, they didn’t directly asses the readability skills of the patients. Third,
they removed non-English language articles. Finally, that they limited their research on one
website only.