Proposed Questions to Assess the Extent of Knowledge in Understanding the Radiology Report Language

Abstract

Radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging play a significant role in medical care. The amount of patient participation and communication can be increased by helping patients understand radiology reports. There is insufficient information on how to measure a patient’s knowledge of a written radiology report. The goal of this study is to design a tool that will measure patient literacy of radiology reports. A radiological literacy tool was created and evaluated as part of the project. There were two groups of patients: control and intervention. A sample radiological report was provided to each group for reading. After reading the report, the groups were quizzed to see how well they understood the report. The participants answered the questions and the correlation between the understanding of the radiology report and the radiology report literacy questions was calculated. The correlations between radiology report literacy questions and radiology report understanding for the intervention and control groups were 0.522, p < 0.001, and 0.536, p < 0.001, respectively. Our radiology literacy tool demonstrated a good ability to measure the awareness of radiology report understanding (area under the receiver operator curve in control group (95% CI: 0.77 (0.71–0.81)) and intervention group (95% CI: 0.79 (0.74–0.84))). We successfully designed a tool that can measure the radiology literacy of patients. This tool is one of the first to measure the level of patient knowledge in the field of radiology understanding.