Digital disparities among healthcare workers in typing speed between generations, genders, and medical specialties

Objective: To investigate the typing skills of healthcare professionals.

Design: Cross sectional study.

Setting: Two large tertiary medical centres in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Participants: 2690 hospital employees working in patient care, research, or medical education.

Main outcome measures: Participants completed a custom built, web based, Santa themed, typing test in 60 seconds and filled out an associated questionnaire. The primary outcome was corrected typing speed, defined as crude typing speed (words per minute) multiplied by accuracy (correct characters as a percentage of total characters in the final transcribed text). Feelings towards administrative tasks scored on the Visual Analogue Scale to Weigh Respondents’ Internalised Typing Enjoyment (VAS-WRITE), in which 0 represents the most negative and 100 the most positive feelings towards administration, were also recorded.

Results: Between 18 and 21 May 2021, a representative cohort of 2690 study participants was recruited (1942 (72.2%) were younger than 40 years; 2065 (76.8%) were women). Respondents’ mean typing speed was 60.1 corrected words per minute (standard deviation 20.8; range 8.0-136.6) with substantial differences between professions and specialties, in which physicians in internal medicine were the fastest among the medical professionals. Typing speed decreased significantly with every age decade (rho −0.51, P<0.001), and people with a history of completing a typing course were more than 20% faster than those who had not (mean difference 12.1 words (standard error 0.8), (95% confidence interval 10.6 to 13.6), P<0.001). The corrected typing speed did not differ between genders (0.5 (0.9) words, (−1.4 to 2.4), P=0.61). Women were less negative towards administration than were men (mean difference VAS-WRITE score 7.68 (standard error 1.17), (95% confidence interval 5.33 to 10.03), P<0.001). Of all professional groups, medical staff reported the most negative feelings towards administration (mean VAS-WRITE score of 33.5 (standard deviation 22.9).

Conclusions: Important differences were reported in typing proficiency between age groups, professions, and medical specialties. Specific groups are at a disadvantage in an increasingly digitalised healthcare system, and these data could inform the implementation of training modules and alternative methods of data entry to level the playing field.