A simple idea to bridge the medical knowledge gap

27 May 2025

Providing clear and concise summaries alongside complex traditional medical research papers will help us all make informed decisions about our health.

Medical journals should introduce plain language summaries of their articles to help patients make better decisions about their own care, a Khalifa University professor has proposed.

Mohamed Seghier, Director of the Healthcare Engineering Innovation Center at Khalifa University, says easy-to-understand explanations of research findings, methods and conclusions would help the public appreciate the significance of the published work and its potential implications.

“In this era of personalized medicine, clinically useful research, most often funded by public money, is not making its way to the general public. This is not helpful given the growing interest in promoting patient-centered care,” says Seghier, who published his idea in a letter to The Lancet early in 2024.

“Clinically useful research is not making its way to the general public. This is not helpful in the growing interest in promoting patient-centered care.”

Mohamed Seghier

Clinicians increasingly see the active engagement of patients in the decision-making process as a cornerstone of patient-centered care. Patients and their family members or carers already look for answers on the internet, so making medical research readily available and easy to read would enable them to access evidence-based information.

“Research papers in medical journals are heavy in technical terms and medical jargon, which makes them extremely difficult for non-experts to understand,” he says.

Accurate depiction

Even experienced journalists writing digests can sometimes struggle to convey an accurate account of medical papers. The most helpful information for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes is often lost in complicated methodological details, statistical analyses, and medical terminology.

Providing relevant information about medical conditions, diagnoses, or new treatments in an easy-to-understand manner would help disseminate useful medical knowledge in the community at large, Seghier argues.

Of particular importance, he says, are large-scale studies about treatment efficacy and side effects, clinical trials, and policy papers that have a direct impact on the availability and quality of treatments.

“Most of the research is publicly funded by taxpayers, so it would make sense to increase its benefit for the health and well-being of citizens,” he says. “Important or impactful research sometimes goes unnoticed or has little impact on the general public’s understanding of medical conditions and treatments.”

Many funding bodies already require researchers to provide a lay summary of their research proposals: for example, the Clinical Trial Regulation of the European Union requires plain language summaries of clinical trials to improve transparency.

While some champion the use of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in scholarly communication, Seghier sounds a note of caution and says summaries are best written by the authors of the papers. “Current generative AI tools might generate inaccurate information,” he warns.