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» Generative artificial intelligence (AI), a rapidly evolving field, has the potential to revolutionize orthopedic care by enhancing diagnostic accuracy, treatment planning, and patient management through data-driven insights and personalized strategies.» Unlike traditional AI, generative AI has the potential to generate relevant information for orthopaedic surgeons when instructed through prompts, automating tasks such as literature reviews, streamlining workflows, predicting health outcomes, and improving patient interactions.» Prompt engineering is essential for crafting effective prompts for large language models (LLMs), ensuring accurate and reliable AI-generated outputs, and promoting ethical decision-making in clinical settings.» Orthopaedic surgeons can choose between various prompt types-including open-ended, focused, and choice-based prompts-to tailor AI responses for specific clinical tasks to enhance the precision and utility of generated information.» Understanding the limitations of LLMs, such as token limits, context windows, and hallucinations, is crucial for orthopaedic surgeons to effectively use generative AI while addressing ethical concerns related to bias, privacy, and accountability., Competing Interests: Disclosure: The Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest forms are provided with the online version of the article (http://links.lww.com/JBJSREV/B163)., (Copyright © 2024 by The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Incorporated.)

Background: Health literacy is the single best predictor of an individual's health status. It is important to customize health-related education material to the individual patient's level of reading skills. Readability of a given text is the objective measurement of the reading skills one should possess to understand the written material., Questions/purposes: In this article, some of the commonly used readability assessment tools are discussed and guidelines to improve the comprehension of patient education handouts are provided. Where are we now? Several healthcare organizations have recommended the readability of patient education materials be no higher than sixth- to eighth-grade level. However, most of the patient education materials currently available on major orthopaedic Web sites are written at a reading level that may be too advanced for comprehension by a substantial proportion of the population. WHERE DO WE NEED TO GO?: There are several readily available and validated tools for assessing the readability of written materials. While use of audiovisual aids such as video clips, line drawings, models, and charts can enhance the comprehension of a health-related topic, standard readability tools cannot construe such enhancements. HOW DO WE GET THERE?: Given the variability in the capacity to comprehend health-related materials among individuals seeking orthopaedic care, stratifying the contents of patient education materials at different levels of complexity will likely improve health literacy and enhance patient-centered communication.

One of the goals of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) is to disseminate patient education materials that suit the readability skills of the patient population. According to standard guidelines from healthcare organizations, the readability of patient education materials should be no higher than the sixth-grade level. We hypothesized the readability level of patient education materials available on the AAOS Web site would be higher than the recommended grade level, regardless when the material was available online. Readability scores of all articles from the AAOS Internet-based patient information Web site, "Your Orthopaedic Connection," were determined using the Flesch-Kincaid grade formula. The mean Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the 426 unique articles was 10.43. Only 10 (2%) of the articles had the recommended readability level of sixth grade or lower. The readability of the articles did not change with time. Our findings suggest the majority of the patient education materials available on the AAOS Web site had readability scores that may be too difficult for comprehension by a substantial portion of the patient population.