New research in the International Journal of Medical Informatics suggests there is a high prevalence of errors from speech recognition technology in emergency departments.
Researchers randomly sampled 100 notes dictated by attending emergency physicians who used speech recognition technology. The notes were collected from the ED's EHR. Two emergency physicians independently conducted an error analysis on the notes.
They found a total of 128 errors in the sampled notes, averaging 1.3 errors per note. Nearly 15 percent of those errors were deemed "critical," meaning they could lead to errors in patient care. Seventy-one percent of the notes had errors.
Researchers noted errors in annunciation were most prevalent (53.9 percent), followed by deletions of words (18 percent) and adding words (11.7 percent). Additionally, 10.9 percent of errors were "nonsense errors," homonyms and spelling errors.
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