Legibility of doctors' handwriting: quantitative comparative study

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Abstract
We contacted the staff in three main settings—the health authority headquarters, an accident and emergency department, and various departments in another hospital—and asked them to complete a form that contained boxes for the respondent's name, the 26 letters of the alphabet, and the digits 0-9. They were told that examples of handwriting were needed to test computer software for optical character recognition and were asked to write as neatly as possible. All 92 staff present in the three settings were asked to participate, and none refused. We analysed their responses with Teleform, a software package that allows handwritten replies on standard forms to be scanned and translated into text for computer analysis.3 Any unrecognised characters are highlighted, and an error score is generated.