Readability of American Academy of Family Physicians patient education materials.

Background And Objectives: Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for the reading demands of patient education materials (PEMs) to exceed the actual literacy abilities of the typical American adult. The purposes of this study were to (1) assess reading demands of English and Spanish language American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) PEMs and (2) examine whether reading demands of English language AAFP PEMs varied from 2004 to 2012.

Methods: In December 2012, matched English and Spanish language AAFP PEMs, available via http://www.familydoctor.org, were downloaded and printed in their entirety (n=200). Reading demands of PEMs were assessed using the Lexile® analyzer, an Internet-based program that uses a combination of sentence length and word frequency to determine text comprehension difficulty.

Results: Lexile scores of English language PEMs averaged 906.0 ± 80.2 (range=700--1,080), while mean Lexile scores of Spanish language PEMs was 874.2 ± 63.9 (range=700--1,060). Overall, reading demands of Spanish language PEMs were significantly lower than PEMs written in English (t=3.1, P<.01). In 2012, 59% of English language PEMs were written ?6th grade reading level, whereas in 2004 only 5% of PEMs were written ?6th grade reading level.

Conclusions: The majority of currently available AAFP PEMS, in both English and Spanish, were written ?6th grade reading level. Since 2004, reading demands of AAFP PEMs have decreased substantially with the majority meeting recommended low-literacy guidelines. Future efforts should be used to revise and reformat all English and Spanish language AAFP PEMs to meet the established ?6th grade reading level.