Evaluation and comparison of errors on nursing notes created by online and offline speech recognition technology and...

Despite the rapid expansion of electronic health records, the use of computer mouse and keyboard, challenges the data entry into these systems. Speech recognition software is one of the substitutes for the mouse and keyboard. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of online and offline speech recognition software on spelling errors in nursing reports and to compare them with errors in handwritten reports.

For this study, online and offline speech recognition software were selected and customized based on unrecognized terms by these softwares. Two groups of 35 nurses provided the admission notes of hospitalized patients upon their arrival using three data entry methods (using the handwritten method or two types of speech recognition software). After at least a month, they created the same reports using the other methods. The number of spelling errors in each method was determined. These errors were compared between the paper method and the two electronic methods before and after the correction of errors.

The lowest accuracy was related to online software with 96.4% and accuracy. On the average per report, the online method 6.76, and the offline method 4.56 generated more errors than the paper method. After correcting the errors by the participants, the number of errors in the online reports decreased by 94.75% and the number of errors in the offline reports decreased by 97.20%. The highest number of reports with errors was related to reports created by online software.

Although two software had relatively high accuracy, they created more errors than the paper method that can be lowered by optimizing and upgrading these softwares. The results showed that error correction by users significantly reduced the documentation errors caused by the software.