This really is a powerful tool for increasing joy in medicine.”Īll providers will see the Dragon icon on the Epic tool bar. “It will help them work more effectively, and therefore allow them to spend more time connecting with patients, which not only improves care but makes each interaction more rewarding.
“For our busy clinicians, this speech recognition software will be crucial in so many ways,” says Paul Rothman, dean of the medical faculty and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine. And providers benefit from a streamlined alternative to keyboarding or waiting for a transcription service. Patients and families like it, says Niessen, because they can listen as the doctor dictates clinic notes that are then instantly available in their M圜hart portal. It’s a project that’s part of the Joy at Hopkins initiative. 14, Dragon became available to any prescribing Epic user across Johns Hopkins Medicine who is interested in using it. I’ll just sit and talk right into my notes. “That means I have that much more time to spend talking with my patients. “I can type 60 or 70 words per minute, but I can dictate 150,” he says. All he has to do is speak into a microphone downloaded onto his phone, and Dragon transcribes in Epic in real time.
“This thing is just so good at getting the jargon right,” he says. He had tried other voice recognition tools, he says, but found they didn’t save time because he had to go back into the medical record to fix misspelled words.ĭragon is better, says Niessen, who has been piloting the tool since late October. You still get the reliable Dragon performance, though, which will keep improving-albeit incrementally-with additional training.Hospital-based internist Timothy Niessen was skeptical about Dragon Medical One.
As an alternative, the $100 Home version offers the whole suite of Professional’s features in Word, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, but lacks full support in Excel and PowerPoint, as well as enterprise administration tools.
Some of the more notable goofs: When I said “alas,” Dragon heard “a laugh.” I got “Cypress then” instead of “out for a spin,” “your blood” instead of “earbud,” and “savagery” instead of “sanitary.”Īt $600, the price for Professional is steep. When I use Dragon, I like to keep my hands off the keyboard as much as possible: The program works great when moving around your desktop, opening, using, and closing apps and when searching on the Web (“search Twitter for Android”) or getting directions, for instance but when it comes to correcting misrecognized words, I found that resorting to the keyboard-just typing the correct spelling-is far quicker, and less frustrating, than correcting by dictation. Of course, with short e-mail messages that use informal language, as opposed to long documents, the need for editing or correction is minimal. However, akin to my experiences with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, I haven’t yet reached an average of 99 percent accuracy across the board. I continued with the training and more yakkety-yak-and accuracy climbed up to 98.3 percent. After the initial training, I started to dictate e-mails and reports, and after rambling on for a few thousand words, I took a tally of the average: 97.8 percent accuracy. I tested Nuance’s Gold candidate-that is, its close-to-final code, which is what the company sent out for review. (I read an excerpt from Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook by Scott Adams for about 5 minutes other text choices are available.)
This process involves reading a series of paragraphs aloud, while the software “listens” and creates your user profile. However, it also recommends that you train Dragon before you start using the program. The company says that you can get up to 99 percent accuracy right out of the box. The good news, though, is that the software’s new features get a thumbs-up they help you use the program more effectively-ultimately, you get more stuff done. In testing, I hoped to encounter exceptional improvements in accuracy and hands-free capabilities, but sadly, I did not.
Since I was impressed with the company’s previous Professional version, I was eager to don a PC headset and start yakking with the new version. Nuance has taken almost two years to roll out its new speech recognition software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.