Enhancing Health Literacy for Patients: Quality and Readability of Healthcare Information Generated by Artificial Intelligence Platforms

Health care is undergoing a digital revolution with the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI). AI may be harnessed to help enhance patient health literacy by providing robust, complete, and accurate information on patients’ diagnosis, treatment, and clinical management. AI platforms are being used to complement patient-physician interactions, to increase health education, as well as acting as translators. The generation of healthcare information by AI tools creates narratives with varying reading abilities. This review examined the readability of 17 recently published papers where AI was employed to generate the healthcare narrative. Overall, the readability of AI-generated healthcare information was poor, with mean Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch Kincaid Grade Level scores of 32.01 (reference target ≥60) and 14.04 (reference target ≤8), respectively. None of the analyzed healthcare information sources reached these target values. It is therefore essential that methods such as separate interfaces and employing key prompts and instructions with the AI-generator are put into place to improve readability before it can be recommended for use with patients.