The Next Frontier in Diabetes Communication: Promoting Health Literacy in the Era of Secure Messaging

In this study, we will examine how diabetes patients with limited health literacy interact with their healthcare providers via secure messages (emails). We will employ computational linguistics and qualitative methods to develop and validate a novel “linguistic complexity profile” (LCP) and use the LCP scores to characterize the linguistic complexity of secure messages sent by patients and providers. We will then use LCP scores to examine whether providers adjust the linguistic complexity of their secure messages to match the complexity of a patient’s secure messages and whether this matching is associated with better medication adherence.

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