Use Grammarly to Improve Clinical and Patient Communications

What This Does

Grammarly reads your outgoing written communications — emails to clinicians, specimen rejection notices, patient-facing explanations — and flags where the language is unclear, too technical, overly curt, or inconsistently formal. Lab professionals often write with precision but not always with clarity or appropriate tone.

Before You Start

• Grammarly is installed as a browser extension (grammarly.com/browser) — works in Gmail, Outlook Web
• Or Grammarly desktop app for Outlook desktop
• You're writing a communication in your email client or a text document

Steps

1. Install Grammarly if not already installed

Go to grammarly.com/browser and install the Chrome or Edge extension. Free tier is sufficient — it includes basic clarity, tone, and grammar suggestions.

2. Write your communication as you normally would

Draft your email or message. Grammarly's small widget (a "G" circle) will appear in any text box. You'll see a score indicator and possibly inline highlighting as you type.

3. Check the Tone indicator

Click the Grammarly icon to open the full panel. Look for the Tone label — it might say "Formal," "Neutral," "Direct," or flags like "May sound blunt" or "May sound clinical/technical."

For communications to clinicians: "Confident and formal" is typically appropriate. For communications to patients: "Warm and simple" is appropriate — but Grammarly may not flag clinical jargon as a problem (since it doesn't know your audience). Use it primarily for tone, not terminology.

4. Review clarity suggestions (the most valuable for lab communications)

Grammarly often flags:

• Unnecessarily long sentences → suggests splitting
• Passive voice overuse → suggests active construction
• Technical terms without context → suggests simplification (useful for patient-facing content)

5. Accept or ignore suggestions selectively

Accept suggestions that genuinely improve the communication. Reject suggestions that change accurate medical terminology — Grammarly sometimes flags technical terms as "uncommon words" when they're actually the correct clinical terms to use.

Real Example

Scenario: You write a clinician notification: "The specimen submitted for serum protein electrophoresis was rejected due to gross lipemia which may cause interference in the densitometric scanning methodology rendering interpretation unreliable."

Grammarly flags: "Long sentence — consider splitting. May sound overly technical."

Suggested revision: "This specimen was rejected due to gross lipemia. Lipemia can interfere with the scanning method and make results unreliable. Please resubmit with a fasting specimen."

Result: The clinician understands immediately what happened and what to do. The original was technically accurate but hard to parse at a glance.

Tips

• Most useful for patient-facing communications — clinical accuracy is not negotiable, but clarity is often improvable
• Use the Clarity suggestions more than the Tone suggestions for clinical writing — the tone is usually appropriately formal; the clarity often needs work
• Install the desktop app if your institution uses Outlook desktop rather than web browser email

Tool interfaces change — if the tone indicator has moved, look for "Goals" or "Tone" settings in the Grammarly sidebar panel.