MedWER: A Reproducible, Model-Free Evaluation Protocol for Medical Speech Recognition

Abstract

Overall word error rate hides clinically critical errors: a transcript can be 95% correct and still swap one drug for another. The usual fix weights errors on medical entities, and almost always depends on an evaluation-time named-entity recognition (NER) model or cloud API, which makes the metric's denominator a versioned black box. We present MedWER, an evaluation protocol and open-source tool for medical ASR whose denominator is a fixed, license-clean term list: 19,373 drug, diagnosis, symptom, and injury-mechanism entries projected from public sources. The protocol couples a pinned text normalizer with a phrase-aware term-restricted WER, the MedWER, so the only versioned component is a normalizer dependency held at an exact release and checked against committed golden fixtures. Coverage is validated against an independent provincial drug-benefit file the list was not built from; the matching heuristic is calibrated against ground-truth entity spans. Baselines for Moonshine~base, Whisper~base.en, and MedASR on two open benchmarks are scored with the released tool and reported with 95% confidence intervals from resampled per-utterance scores.