A new Doctor-to-Patient Translator aims to use AI and large language models to transform medical jargon into simple, accurate information for patients.

The translator, developed by Vital, is HIPAA compliant and designed for interpreting complex doctor's notes, radiologist reads, discharge summaries, test results and more into a 5th-grade reading level.

“While the 21st Century Cures Act requires all providers to release medical notes to patients, they can seem like a foreign language,” said Aaron Patzer, co-founder and CEO at Vital. “In medical notes, it's not a ‘nosebleed’, it's ‘epistaxis’, not a ‘stroke’ but a ‘cerebral infarction’. Instead of writing ‘don't eat before surgery’ doctors use the abbreviation ‘NPO’. For people who aren't medically trained, misunderstanding medical jargon can result in unnecessary stress and poor health outcomes.”

Unveiled at the Ai4 Conference in Las Vegas on August 8, the Doctor-to-Patient Translator is meant to benefit providers by elevating the level of health literacy for patients and other care team members — resulting in reduced workload, less time explaining diagnoses and treatments, and a reduced risk of miscommunication.

The Doctor-to-Patient Translator tool is available to facilities across the U.S. that use Vital's ERAdvisor and CareAdvisor applications — patient experience platforms used by over one million people per year. In addition, the Doctor-to-Patient Translator is free to the public.

As of July 2023, a panel of internal and external physicians studied nearly two thousand Doctor-to-Patient Translator outputs from real-world medical notes, finding that 99.4% of the translations were safe (will not lead to patient harm). Only 0.6% were marked as unsafe, in that they contained inaccurate information or were missing key information.

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