Patient Engagement with Radiology Report Content: A Retrospective Analysis of 60,572 Radiology Report Views

Abstract

Rationale and Objectives

To evaluate patient use of plain language radiology report content.

Methods

Webpage-style radiology reports delivering patient-centered content were made available to patients via an online patient portal. Simple language explanations of terms and phrases in the reports were accessible to patients via a clickable hyperlink. For each viewed radiology report over a one-year study period, we recorded a count of the individual terms and phrases in the report that were annotated (i.e., had accessible patient-centered content), the annotated terms and phrases that the patient clicked, and the number of clicks of each term. The terms were categorized according to the hierarchical RadLex Tree Browser.

Results

In 60,572 unique viewed reports, there were 380,798 term clicks out of 4264,663 annotated terms (overall click rate 8.9%). 878 terms were annotated ≥ 1000 times. The click rate varied between these high-frequency terms from 0.1% to 63.2%. The average term click rate varied between RadLex categories from 16.7% for clinical findings to 7.9% for the property category.

Discussion

Modern web technologies can be used to gain insight into patient experience viewing online radiology reports. There is a significant variance in patient use of patient-centered radiology report content.