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October 05, 2023
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ChatGPT may help improve access to health information

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ChatGPT showed the potential to generate high-readability health education materials in both English and Spanish, possibly improving access to health care and health information for Spanish-speaking populations.

According to a poster presented by Clarisa Marie Bloemhof and colleagues at Real World Ophthalmology, 10 questions related to diabetic retinopathy were submitted in English to ChatGPT and Google. The same questions were submitted to ChatGPT again with the instruction: “Tell me like I am in the sixth grade.” The entire process was repeated in Spanish. The Flesch Reading Ease score for English and the Fernandez-Huerta formula for Spanish were calculated. A repeated measures ANOVA compared the effect of the response source on the readability score, the poster said.

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ChatGPT showed the potential to generate high-readability health education materials in both English and Spanish, possibly improving access to health care and health information for Spanish-speaking populations.

Overall, the readability scores were higher for ChatGPT than Google. Interestingly, the scores for ChatGPT in Spanish with the sixth grade command were higher than those in English with the same command.

“Given its status as a free, online platform, ChatGPT could potentially serve as a novel tool for Spanish speakers in resource-constrained regions, offering health education alternatives in cases where comprehensible Spanish [patient education materials] are scarce,” the authors wrote.

They specified that because the accuracy of information produced by ChatGPT was not evaluated in the study, further investigation is warranted before recommending this resource to patients.