Recently, researchers studied 50 patient progress notes. They found that they could not read 16% of the words. The misunderstanding that this causes can mean that a patient is given the wrong blood, or that a surgeon amputates the wrong limb. Fatal errors, of course, make news, but studies show that every year hundreds of thousands of mistakes are made in hospitals around the world, and a lot of them are because of bad handwriting or abbreviation which nobody understands. Bad handwriting also causes delays, which are expensive and wasteful.