Improving Health Literacy and Patient Well-being

One of the largest healthcare systems in the United States, Lifespan, is running a project that uses GPT-4 to convert surgical consent forms full of difficult medical terminology into text that is easier for patients to understand. Existing surgical consent forms have required a college-level reading ability, but it has been pointed out that more than half of Americans have a reading ability at or below a middle school level.

Lifespan's medical staff used GPT-4 to lower the reading level of the consent forms to a middle school level while preserving their core content. To minimize the risk of AI hallucination or bias, the following verification process was introduced.

• Draft generation via GPT-4
• Final review and revision by legal and medical experts

As a result, consent forms that used to run to 3 pages were dramatically reduced to 1 page, and the word count decreased by about 25%. The accuracy was high enough that medical staff needed almost no revisions, and patients gave positive feedback saying the forms were easy to understand and provided psychological reassurance.

Based on this success, Lifespan is expanding this process to other medical documents, such as patient intake forms and chemotherapy consent forms. The findings were published in NEJM AI.