Medizinische Universität Graz - Research portal
Selected Publication:
Schwarz, W.
Patient Empowerment in Radiology
Humanmedizin; [ Diplomarbeit ] Medizinische Universität Graz; 2023. pp. 69
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- Authors Med Uni Graz:
- Advisor:
- Hassler Eva Maria
- Reishofer Gernot
- Altmetrics:
- Abstract:
- Patient Empowerment (PE), the concept of giving patients the capacity and power to act on their own health, has gained significance in medicine in the last decade. Since patients are getting older and seem to be willing to actively participate in their own health issues, and time demands are becoming more difficult for physicians to manage, the need for methods to reduce physicians’ workload and distribute responsibility among patients is increasing. To improve PE knowledge and competencies must be built on the patient side, dialogue and involvement must take place at institutional and political levels. Through that, time and money can be saved to the healthcare-system while clinical outcomes and satisfaction of patients can be improved. One important aspect in educating patients is targeting resources on patients’ level of health literacy. Often patient reports include a number of, for medical lay-people, hardly understandable terms, which leave patients uninformed and disempowered, as they are dependent on further explanation from professionals. To respond to this problem, the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify difficult-to-understand reports is analyzed in this paper. Patients were given reports in two different formats, the usual format with medical language and a simplified and more structured one. Five different patient reports, with differently concerning results and difficulty were used. Levels of understanding and levels of concern were evaluated. Levels of understanding show a significant increase among all patient reports, levels of concern show a significant decrease when analyzing the reports together. Individually evaluated, in 3 out of 5 patient reports the simplification results in a significant decrease of concern. Interpreting the results, it seems that the translation leads to significant improvements in levels of understanding across all patient reports. Best understandable were short patient reports with fewer and easier translations. Regarding levels of concern, two effects seem to play a role. When patients understand the report, levels of concern are decreasing while depending on the results of the examination, if it was rather alarming or calming, the level of concern becomes more appropriate. With the involvement of electronic health records (EHRs), AI- based text-simplification can improve PE and add value to the healthcare-system.