TypePRN blog

Does Typing Speed Actually Help Nurses Chart Faster?

If you searched this, you've probably stared at a flowsheet at 0300 thinking "there has to be a faster way to do this." So here's the honest answer up front: typing speed helps a little, but it's not the lever you think it is. Documentation eats a huge chunk of every shift, and most of that time goes to clicking, navigating, scrolling, and deciding what to write — not to the raw act of pressing keys. If you're a slow hunt-and-peck typist, removing keyboard friction is a real win. But if you already type at a normal clip, getting faster at typing won't give you your evening back. This post lays out what the research actually shows, where typing speed fits, and what tends to move charting time more. (TypePRN is the free typing game we make for nurses — we'd rather tell you the truth than oversell it.)

First, the real problem: documentation eats a third of your shift

You're not imagining it — charting genuinely consumes a large minority of nursing time. The most-cited study is a 36-hospital, 767-nurse time-and-motion analysis that found documentation took up 35.3% of med-surg nurses' practice time, about 147.5 minutes per shift — the single largest activity category, ahead of care coordination and medication administration (Hendrich et al., Permanente Journal, 2008).

Newer EHR-log studies land in the same range. Nurses spend roughly 3 hours of a 12-hour shift in the EHR, with about 31% of the shift in flowsheets alone — logging somewhere between 631 and 875 flowsheet entries per shift, close to one entry every minute (JMIR Nursing, 2025). In the emergency department, one time-and-motion study found nurses spent 27% of their time on the EHR — more than direct patient care at 25% (Journal of Emergency Nursing, 2024). A systematic review pegs the inpatient nurse average at 22% of the workday in the EHR, with a wide 18–57% range across studies (Applied Clinical Informatics, 2021).

So the frustration is legitimate and well-documented. The question is whether typing speed is what's standing between you and a shorter charting day.

The honest answer: typing speed is a real but minor lever

Here's the part that matters. Those big documentation percentages include reviewing charts, navigating menus, clicking checkboxes, building flowsheet rows, waiting on the system, and thinking about what to write. Raw keystroke time — actually typing words into a box — is only a slice of that.

The clearest signal comes from a study where nurses estimated they spent 26% of the shift charting, but observers measured pure charting at only about 11% (Higgins et al., 2017). We tend to overestimate how much of the burden is the typing itself, because it feels tedious. A lot of the felt pain is clicking and navigating, not key-pressing.

Think of it this way: if you type at the average adult speed of about 40 WPM (Wonderlic) and you bump yourself to 55 WPM, you've sped up the part of charting that's already the smallest piece. That's a genuine improvement at the margins — but it won't touch the clicking, the menu-hunting, or the system lag that make up most of the burden. Typing faster is a real lever. It's just a short one.

What actually moves charting time more than typing

If the goal is leaving on time, these tend to matter far more than your WPM:

• Templates and dot-phrases / SmartPhrases: A well-built template turns a paragraph of typing into a few keystrokes. This is the single biggest swing for most nurses — you're not typing faster, you're typing less.
• Dictation and voice tools: When available, speaking a note can outpace any keyboard, and it sidesteps typing speed entirely.
• Knowing your EHR's workflow: Keyboard shortcuts, favorites lists, copy-forward (used carefully and honestly), and not re-navigating to the same flowsheet five times. Most of the EHR time in the studies above is interaction overhead, not typing.
• Charting closer to real time: Batching everything to end-of-shift means re-remembering, which is slow regardless of typing speed.
• Touch-typing without looking down: This is the one place typing skill genuinely helps — not because your hands move faster, but because you stop breaking your train of thought to find keys, and you keep your eyes on the screen and the patient.

None of these are things a typing game can give you. They come from your unit, your educator, your EHR build, and practice on the floor.

So where does practicing typing actually fit?

Typing practice helps in one specific, honest way: it removes keyboard friction. If hunting for keys pulls your attention away from the patient or the note, getting more fluent frees up that attention. For context, hunt-and-peck typists tend to run around 27–37 WPM, while comfortable touch-typists clear 45–60 WPM and up (Wikipedia, citing Karat et al., 1999; Wonderlic). Closing that gap is real — it's just a comfort-and-attention win, not a documentation-time fix.

It also doesn't hurt that a lot of clinical vocabulary is awkward to type. Med names, abbreviations like PRN/BID/NPO, and SBAR phrasing aren't the words you practiced in middle-school typing class. Getting fluent on that specific vocabulary means fewer fumbles and corrections when you're charting for real.

That's the whole honest pitch — nothing more.

Where TypePRN comes in (and where it doesn't)

TypePRN is a free, browser-based typing game built around realistic, computer-generated EMR and handoff text — SBAR snippets, nursing notes, med names, and the abbreviations you actually use. There's a Monkeytype-style timed Practice mode and a Balatro-style typing roguelike called Rounds, themed as a hospital shift. It runs locally, needs no sign-up, and requires a physical keyboard.

What it does: makes removing keyboard friction on clinical vocabulary low-stakes and genuinely fun, and tells you your typing WPM and accuracy.

What it does not do — and we want to be blunt about this: it does not improve your real charting speed, accuracy, or documentation quality. It is not clinical training, NCLEX prep, medical advice, or a reference. The patients and names in it are computer-generated fiction — never type real patient data into it or anywhere it doesn't belong. Your scores measure typing only, never clinical skill or readiness.

If you want a fun way to get more comfortable at the keyboard, it's here for you. If you want your charting hours back, start with templates, dot-phrases, dictation, and your EHR's workflow — those are where the real time lives.