JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

People with low health literacy experience more challenges in understanding instructions given by their health providers, following prescriptions, and understanding their healthcare system well enough to get the maximum benefits. People with insufficient health literacy have a higher risk of making medical mistakes, more chances of experiencing adverse drug effects, and inferior control of chronic diseases.

Objective:

This study aimed to design, develop, and evaluate a mHealth application, MediReader, to help individuals better understand complex medical materials and improve their health literacy.

Methods:

MediReader is designed and implemented through several steps: (1) Measure and understand an individual’s health literacy level. (2) Identify medical terminologies the individual may not understand based on his/her health literacy. (3) Annotate and interpret the identified medical terminologies tailored to the individual’s reading skill levels with meanings defined in the appropriate external knowledge sources. (4) Evaluate MediReader with task-based user study and satisfaction surveys.

Results:

Based on the comparison with a control group, user study results demonstrate that MediReader can improve users’ understanding of medical documents. The improvement is especially significant for users with lower health literacy levels. The satisfaction survey shows that users are satisfied with the tool in general.

Conclusions:

MediReader provides an easy-to-use interface for users to read and understand medical documents. It can effectively identify medical terms a user may not understand, and then annotate and interpret them with appropriate meanings with languages that the user can understand. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using this tool to improve an individual’s understanding of medical materials.