New Frontiers in Health Literacy: Using ChatGPT to Simplify Health Information for People in the Community

Background: Most health information does not meet the health literacy needs of our communities. Writing health information in plain language is time-consuming but the release of tools like ChatGPT may make it easier to produce reliable plain language health information.

Objective: To investigate the capacity for ChatGPT to produce plain language versions of health texts.

Design: Observational study of 26 health texts from reputable websites.

Methods: ChatGPT was prompted to 'rewrite the text for people with low literacy'. Researchers captured three revised versions of each original text.

Main measures: Objective health literacy assessment, including Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), proportion of the text that contains complex language (%), number of instances of passive voice and subjective ratings of key messages retained (%).

Key results: On average, original texts were written at grade 12.8 (SD = 2.2) and revised to grade 11.0 (SD = 1.2), p < 0.001. Original texts were on average 22.8% complex (SD = 7.5%) compared to 14.4% (SD = 5.6%) in revised texts, p < 0.001. Original texts had on average 4.7 instances (SD = 3.2) of passive text compared to 1.7 (SD = 1.2) in revised texts, p < 0.001. On average 80% of key messages were retained (SD = 15.0). The more complex original texts showed more improvements than less complex original texts. For example, when original texts were ≥ grade 13, revised versions improved by an average 3.3 grades (SD = 2.2), p < 0.001. Simpler original texts (< grade 11) improved by an average 0.5 grades (SD = 1.4), p < 0.001.

Conclusions: This study used multiple objective assessments of health literacy to demonstrate that ChatGPT can simplify health information while retaining most key messages. However, the revised texts typically did not meet health literacy targets for grade reading score, and improvements were marginal for texts that were already relatively simple.