ChatGPT-4 Can Help Hand Surgeons Communicate Better With Patients

The American Society for Surgery of the Hand and British Society for Surgery of the Hand produce patient-focused information above the sixth-grade readability recommended by the American Medical Association. To promote health equity, patient-focused content should be aimed at an appropriate level of health literacy. Artificial intelligence–driven large language models may be able to assist hand surgery societies in improving the readability of the information provided to patients. The readability was calculated for all the articles written in English on the American Society for Surgery of the Hand and British Society for Surgery of the Hand websites, in terms of seven of the commonest readability formulas. Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer version 4 (ChatGPT-4) was then asked to rewrite each article at a sixth-grade readability level. The readability for each response was calculated and compared with the unedited articles. Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer version 4 was able to improve the readability across all chosen readability formulas and was successful in achieving a mean sixth-grade readability level in terms of the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook calculations. It increased the mean Flesch Reading Ease score, with higher scores representing more readable material. This study demonstrated that ChatGPT-4 can be used to improve the readability of patient-focused material in hand surgery. However, ChatGPT-4 is interested primarily in sounding natural, and not in seeking truth, and hence, each response must be evaluated by the surgeon to ensure that information accuracy is not being sacrificed for the sake of readability by this powerful tool.