How Do You 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. 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 Analyze a sample of the medical transcriptionist’s work to determine the number of mistakes made and the total number of words. For instance,
