Medical Professional

Why Typing Speed Matters for Medical Professionals

Modern healthcare runs on electronic health records (EHR). Doctors, nurses, and medical administrators spend significant portions of their shifts typing patient notes, prescriptions, referrals, and lab orders. Studies have shown physicians spend up to two hours on EHR tasks for every hour of patient care. Improving typing speed directly reduces this documentation burden, freeing time for patient interaction. In emergency settings, fast and accurate typing can literally save lives by ensuring critical information is documented without delay.

Recommended WPM Targets

• Beginner (35–50 WPM): Functional but documentation takes excessive time away from patient care.
• Intermediate (55–70 WPM): Comfortable with EHR systems. Can keep up with most clinical documentation needs.
• Advanced (75–90+ WPM): Highly efficient. Documentation is completed during or immediately after patient visits with minimal catch-up.

Specific Typing Skills Needed

Medical terminology is its own language. You must type long, complex words like electroencephalogram, cholecystectomy, and gastroenteritis fluidly. Drug names present a similar challenge — generic and brand names often combine unusual letter sequences. Abbreviations are widely used and must be typed accurately: q.i.d., b.i.d., p.r.n., NPO, and countless others.

EHR systems have their own interfaces and shortcuts. Learning the specific keybindings for your facility's software — whether Epic, Cerner, or Meditech — is essential. Many systems use templates and dot phrases that expand into standard text blocks. Creating and memorizing these shortcuts saves enormous time. Numeric accuracy is critical for prescriptions, dosages, and lab values. A mis-keyed decimal point can have catastrophic consequences, making careful typing habits non-negotiable.

Practice Recommendations

Build a custom vocabulary list of the 100 most common medical terms in your specialty and drill them daily. Use Typing.com custom text mode or Keybr.com to practice with medical terminology. For EHR-specific practice, many systems offer training modules with sample patient encounters.

Practice typing SOAP notes from scratch — Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan. This structured format is universal in medical documentation and typing it repeatedly builds both speed and familiarity. Speed drills with drug names from the FDA Orange Book help prepare for prescription writing.

Tools and Resources

• Epic UserWeb Training — Official training resources for the most widely used EHR system.
• Medical Terminology Drills — Apps like Medical Terminology Flashcards for building vocabulary.
• Typing.com Medical Terms — Custom typing drills for healthcare professionals.
• FDA Orange Book — Comprehensive list of approved drug names for practice.
• Nursing Times Typing Guide — Resources tailored to healthcare documentation needs.