Calculating Medical Transcription Error Rates: A Comprehensive Guide

Medical transcriptionists listen to dictated recordings made by medical professionals and create text files from the material. Transcriptionists typically work using a headset and a special pedal for controlling the recording speed as they type. A good transcriptionist will make few mistakes as she works, but no one's perfect. Typical errors include misspellings or wrongly inserted words that occur because a part of the recorded speech is misheard. Since transcription errors occur on single words, you can determine a medical transcriptionist's overall error rate by calculating the percentage of words that are misspelled or misheard.

Instructions

• 1

  Use the following equation for calculating the error rate as a percentage:

  Error rate = (M/T) x 100 percent

  M = number of mistakes in the form of misspellings or misheard words
  T = total number of words in the sample

• 2

  Analyze a sample of the medical transcriptionist's work to determine the number of mistakes made and the total number of words. For instance, consider a document containing 500 words and 10 mistakes.

• 3

  Input the numbers into the equation to calculate the transcriptionist's error rate:

  Error Rate = (10/500) x 100 percent = 2 percent

  This transcriptionist has a 2 percent error rate.