Conveying the right words is important when communicating with people, but the right words don’t necessarily always mean it would be understandable. Even when the terms are correct, they can be too technical for people to understand. One example is when doctors give medical advice or hospital notes to patients. While patients can probably find out some things on their own by researching a term, that tactic won’t go far with full-on reports. Not understanding something like this can be very frustrating. It’s even worse when that lack of knowledge directly affects you or your loved ones. Thankfully, the NYU Langone Health Medical Center saw this situation and came up with a solution in the form of an AI hospital note rewriter.
NYU Langone Health develops generative AI tool that simplifies doctors' notes from hospital visits into patient-friendly language, making them more understandable by reducing the reading level from the 11th-grade to the 6th-grade levelhttps://t.co/IgTsRS0CsS #DigitalHealth #AI
— Gary Monk (@GaryMonk) March 14, 2024
Simple yet effective
AI rewriting capabilities are often considered just a gimmick. Tell an AI to rewrite your text in George RR Martin’s style, and it will. However, since AIs like ChatGPT are trained on massive amounts of data, they also have medical terms in their databases. This makes it possible for it to simplify hospital notes as well potentially. Of course, in sensitive cases like this, human supervision is needed, and NYU Langone did its research based on these exact premises.
The results are promising. Physicians and nurses wrote prompts describing the patient’s conditions and let the AI rewrite them for a non-medical audience. Over half (56%) of the notes tested were considered perfect by the supervisors on a six-scale rating. That means there is more than a 50/50 chance that each note can be simplified with accuracy without needing a doctor to edit it. This not only delivers clear notes to the patients to reduce their anxieties and improve their understanding but also reduces time spent writing and explaining. In this way, medical personnel could use that time to look after other patients and do more meaningful work.
In a new study published in @JAMANetworkOpen, researchers at NYU Langone Health show how generative AI can be used to create hospital discharge summaries that are easier for patients to read and understand.
Learn more: https://t.co/g7IGtlUNCo pic.twitter.com/4tk9DVDiQv
— NYU Grossman School of Medicine (@nyugrossman) March 11, 2024
Using the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool Methodology, researchers scored the AI hospital note rewriter’s understandability at 81%. That’s a considerable jump from the 13% from the original ones. NYU Langone will continue their research on the potential of an AI hospital note rewriter. In a few weeks, a new program will launch to test how patients find the new note system. At the same time, they plan to expand the research on a larger scale by the summer. In situations like this, I’d prefer understandable AI notes over overcomplicated and jargon-filled notes from a human, as long as they have been approved.
Photo credit: The feature image is symbolic and has been provided by NYU Langone as part of a not directly related press release.
Source: PR Newswire
