Patients can read their own records. Most cannot understand them.

Patients have had the right to read their own records since the 21st Century Cures Act rules took effect in 2021, and portals now hand over most of the chart. What they hand over is the hospital's own format: SNOMED codes for conditions, RxNorm codes for drugs, LOINC codes for labs, a value with an H beside it. I wanted the version a nurse would say across a kitchen table, with the page it came from.

So MedLit reads the record as the hospital stores it, looks each code up in the registries the National Library of Medicine and the FDA publish, and asks a language model to explain what it found in plain words at a reading level you choose. The model never decides whether a number is normal; the reference range does that. Every paragraph carries the MedlinePlus or openFDA page it came from, and I score the text itself for reading level before you see it.