# Impact of Large Language Model Assistance on Patients Reading Clinical Notes: A Mixed-Methods Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09637 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09637/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09617/) (2023)
- [AI Chains: Transparent and Controllable Human-AI Interaction by Chaining Large Language Model Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01691/) (2021)
- [GatorTron: A Large Clinical Language Model to Unlock Patient Information from Unstructured Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03540/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Few-Shot Clinical Information Extractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12689/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04675/) (2023)
- [ACI-BENCH: a Novel Ambient Clinical Intelligence Dataset for Benchmarking Automatic Visit Note Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02022/) (2023)
- [Publicly Shareable Clinical Large Language Model Built on Synthetic Clinical Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00237/) (2023)
- [BLESS: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Sentence Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15773/) (2023)
- [Paper Plain: Making Medical Research Papers Approachable to Healthcare Consumers with Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00130/) (2022)
- [PaniniQA: Enhancing Patient Education Through Interactive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03253/) (2023)
- [Write It Like You See It: Detectable Differences in Clinical Notes By Race Lead To Differential Model Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03931/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Contextual Evaluation of Large Language Models for Classifying Tropical and Infectious Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09201/) (2024)
- [The use of large language models to enhance cancer clinical trial educational materials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01955/) (2024)
- [Enhancing LLMs for Identifying and Prioritizing Important Medical Jargons from Electronic Health Record Notes Utilizing Data Augmentation: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16022/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have immense potential to make information more accessible, particularly in medicine, where complex medical jargon can hinder patient comprehension of clinical notes. We developed a patient-facing tool using LLMs to make clinical notes more readable by simplifying, extracting information from, and adding context to the notes. We piloted the tool with clinical notes donated by patients with a history of breast cancer and synthetic notes from a clinician. Participants (N=200, healthy, female-identifying patients) were randomly assigned three clinical notes in our tool with varying levels of augmentations and answered quantitative and qualitative questions evaluating their understanding of follow-up actions. Augmentations significantly increased their quantitative understanding scores. In-depth interviews were conducted with participants (N=7, patients with a history of breast cancer), revealing both positive sentiments about the augmentations and concerns about AI. We also performed a qualitative clinician-driven analysis of the model's error modes.