How to Calculate the Overall Error Rate in Medical Transcription

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.