I have handed a lot of paperwork to a lot of patients over 23 years of nursing. Discharge instructions. Consent forms. After-visit summaries. And it wasn’t until I started formally studying technical and professional communication that I could name what I’d been watching happen all along: healthcare organizations consistently write for the wrong audience. The numbers make this concrete. Most patient-facing healthcare content is written at a 10th grade level or higher. Nearly half of U.S. adults read at or below an 8th grade level. That gap isn’t a coincidence — it’s a design failure. And it has real consequences for patient safety.
The Jargon Problem Is Bigger Than You Think
Here’s an example I’ve used with my own nursing students. A discharge instruction might read: “Take acetaminophen 650mg PO Q6 hours PRN for pain or fever.” As a nurse, I parse that instantly. But a patient going home after a procedure — tired, anxious, possibly alone — sees a string of letters and numbers that tells them almost nothing.
They may not know that acetaminophen is Tylenol. They may not know that PO means “by mouth,” or that PRN means “as needed.” They may not realize that 650mg means two standard tablets. One poorly written line can lead to under-dosing, overdosing, or simply not taking the medication at all.
This is not a patient literacy problem. It’s a writing problem. And technical communicators are trained to fix exactly this kind of thing.
When the Document Isn’t the Only Issue
During my home visits with Optum, I sit with patients for about an hour — something most clinical encounters don’t allow. What I find, repeatedly, is that patients don’t understand their own medical records. They may not know what their diagnosis means, why they’re taking a medication, or what an abnormal lab value on their patient portal is telling them.
I’ve sat in living rooms with patients who have been managing a chronic condition for years, and they still don’t fully understand it — not because they aren’t capable, but because no one ever translated the information into language that worked for them.
Patient portals have changed the landscape dramatically. Patients now receive lab results before their doctor has reviewed them — results written in clinical shorthand, full of abbreviations like WBC and RBC, flagged as ‘abnormal’ without context. That’s not transparency. That’s anxiety without understanding.
AI-generated health content adds another layer of complexity. When patients “ask Dr. Google,” they’re increasingly encountering AI-written responses that may be inaccurate, oversimplified, or written for no clear audience at all. Who is accountable for that content? That question doesn’t have a clean answer yet — but it’s one technical communicators should be asking.
What Audience Analysis Actually Looks Like in Practice
In New Mexico, where I’ve practiced most of my career, patient education materials must meet a fifth-grade reading level. We also require Spanish and Vietnamese translations for a significant portion of our patient population. That’s audience analysis in action — not as an abstract concept, but as a clinical requirement.
The problem is that this kind of intentional, audience-centered thinking is still the exception rather than the rule. Most patient-facing documents are written by clinicians, for clinicians, and handed to patients without revision. The CDC’s plain language guidelines and the AMA’s health literacy resources exist precisely because this gap is well-documented — and still largely unaddressed.
Technical communicators bring the tools to change this: audience analysis, plain language principles, user-centered design, and an understanding that clarity is not the same as oversimplification. Writing at a fifth-grade level doesn’t mean writing down to someone. It means respecting that your reader is a human being in a stressful situation who deserves to understand what’s happening to their own body.
Where This Goes Next
I want to see technical and professional communicators embedded in healthcare teams — working alongside doctors, nurses, and administrators to develop content that actually serves patients. Not as an afterthought, but as a core part of how healthcare communicates.
The rise of AI in healthcare content creation makes this more urgent, not less. Someone with training in communication, audience analysis, and information design needs to be in the room when that content is being produced and reviewed.
If you’re writing something for a patient, ask yourself one question: would my grandmother understand this at 2am after a scary diagnosis? If the answer is no — or even maybe — it needs another pass. That’s not a low bar. That’s the bar.
The TCLoc master’s Program at the University of Strasbourg trains exactly the kind of communicators healthcare needs — professionals who understand how to translate complex information for real audiences, across languages and contexts. If you’re looking to apply your communication skills where they can genuinely save lives, healthcare is waiting.
