Readability formulas applied to medical reports: Restrictions of a quantitative analysis

Abstract

Health literacy aims to improve the ability to make decisions about our health and thus improve our quality of life. This is why the project JUNTOS (TOGETHER) aimed to do everything possible to promote health literacy, on the basis of a specific sociolinguistic problem. One of the objectives of this project was to carry out a quantitative readability analysis of written medical reports received by families with a child affected by a rare disease, as a way to account for the comprehension difficulty that these texts represent for these families. To carry out this analysis, we used different readability tools that currently exist for texts written in Spanish and English. The results we obtained led us to realize that there are some limitations that do not allow this type of quantitative analysis to be completely reliable when applied to specialized texts, specifically medical texts and more specifically medical reports; and at the same time they lead us to highlight the need to carry out parallel qualitative analyses when trying to make a readability analysis of specialized texts of this nature. Hence, the results of this research provide us with new ideas to continue working on this line of research.