  Patients derive numerous benefits from reading their clinical notes,
including an increased sense of control over their health and improved
understanding of their care plan. However, complex medical concepts and jargon
within clinical notes hinder patient comprehension and may lead to anxiety. We
developed a patient-facing tool to make clinical notes more readable,
leveraging large language models (LLMs) to simplify, extract information from,
and add context to notes. We prompt engineered GPT-4 to perform these
augmentation tasks on real clinical notes donated by breast cancer survivors
and synthetic notes generated by a clinician, a total of 12 notes with 3868
words. In June 2023, 200 female-identifying US-based participants were randomly
assigned three clinical notes with varying levels of augmentations using our
tool. Participants answered questions about each note, evaluating their
understanding of follow-up actions and self-reported confidence. We found that
augmentations were associated with a significant increase in action
understanding score (0.63 $\pm$ 0.04 for select augmentations, compared to 0.54
$\pm$ 0.02 for the control) with p=0.002. In-depth interviews of
self-identifying breast cancer patients (N=7) were also conducted via video
conferencing. Augmentations, especially definitions, elicited positive
responses among the seven participants, with some concerns about relying on
LLMs. Augmentations were evaluated for errors by clinicians, and we found
misleading errors occur, with errors more common in real donated notes than
synthetic notes, illustrating the importance of carefully written clinical
notes. Augmentations improve some but not all readability metrics. This work
demonstrates the potential of LLMs to improve patients' experience with
clinical notes at a lower burden to clinicians. However, having a human in the
loop is important to correct potential model errors.
