Today we’re going to guide you through Nuance’s latest addition to the medical speech-recognition software lineup, Dragon Medical Practice Edition 11.
For practices with less than 25 physicians, Dragon Medical 11 is the only real-time speech recognition solution you need to dictate, email and operate your computer three times faster than before. You speak and it types. It opens programs for you and even browses the web. Dragon speech recognition technology is trusted by over 180,000 clinicians in healthcare clinics, practices, and hospitals around the world.
Dragon Medical Practice Edition works with virtually every EHR/EMR system out there, supporting over 150 systems. The following are just a handful of the EHR/EMR systems that are supported:
- JonokeMed By Jonoke Software Development, Inc.
- Accuro EMR By OptiMed Software Corporation
- ChartCare EMR By CHARTCARE, Inc.
- digiChart® By digiChart, Inc.
- Electronic Patient Charts By American Medical Software
- HealthPort EMR V9.0 By HealthPort™
- Medios EHR By IOS Health Systems
- TransMed By TransMed Network
If you’re not sure if your software is supported, the full list can be found here. Remember, Dragon software acts as a verbal keyboard, so if you can type it, you can dictate it.
Dragon Medical Practice Edition also includes vocabularies covering nearly 60 different medical specialties and subspecialties, from anesthesiology to vascular radiology and beyond. This means you’ll spend less time going back and forth correcting text – the software knows exactly what you’re talking about. To see the full list of medical vocabularies included, click here.
Training Your Voice
The most important aspect of the Dragon Medical software is its ability to understand your voice. To get started, we’ll need to train the software to understand you. From the Dragon Bar, click “Audio” followed by “Read text to improve accuracy…”
Then click “Go” and read what appears on the screen.
You will then read a series of voice tests ranging from easy to hard so that the software can improve the accuracy of dictation. Allow 5 minutes if you plan to use Dragon in the front-end (using it live with a Philips SpeechMike or headset) and 15 minutes for back-end (using a Philips or Olympus digital portable).
This may seem like a long time to spend speaking into the microphone to test your voice, but you will find that it’s well worth it when the software is able to perfectly understand what you’re saying. In fact, Dragon Medical boasts over 99% accuracy in translating your voice to text. You can go back to these texts at any time if you feel you want to improve the accuracy of the software.
Once you’ve completed the first part of the training, you might find that you have to train the software to further understand particular words and phrases. There’s roughly 4% of words that all people say uniquely. While the software is extremely accurate, it’s not human. For example saying the word “already” can sometimes sound like “RD”.
Dictation Basics
Let’s get started with the standard dictation functions and features.
It used to be that one had to speak very slowly to get speech recognition software to work. Thankfully, this is no longer the case. When using Dragon Medical Practice Edition, feel free to speak in your usual voice, at a speed and tone you feel most comfortable with. You will actually get better results dictating normally rather than labouring your dictation.
To dictate punctuation, simply say the punctuation word as you dictate the text. For example, saying “The patient complained of tightness in the chest comma wheezing comma and a fever of one hundred one point five degrees Farenheit period” would yield the following text result: “The patient complained of tightness in the chest, wheezing, and a fever of 101.5 ºF.”
Formatting is no different. To insert a new paragraph, simplay say “New paragraph”.
If you need to select anything you’ve dictated, say “select” followed by the word you wish to select. For example, saying “Select vital” would select the word “vital” for you.
If you’ve made an error and you want to delete what you just said, go ahead and say, “Scratch that”. Dragon will erase the last few words you just said. Alternatively, you can select a word or entire sentence (for example, “select last sentence”) and say, “Delete that”.
You can also use formatting options like bold, italics, and underline by saying “Bold that” and so on. To select something, just say “Select”.
Opening, Saving, and Printing
Simple tasks like opening documents, saving files, and printing are made easy with Dragon Medical Practice Edition. Use the following commands to easily perform common tasks:
- “Open a document”
- “Save the file”
- “Save file as”
- “Print file”
- “Close document”
Dragon Sidebar
A great new feature found in Dragon Medical 11 is the all-new Dragon Sidebar. This sidebar floats on the side of your screen and is your guide to keywords, features, and more.
Dragon Medical Practice Edition contains over 1,000 different commands and keywords. Thankfully, the Dragon Sidebar will show you all the available commands for any program you’re using, so you never have to worry about forgetting something important.
Creating New Commands
In addition to the 1,000 commands included in Dragon Medical Practice Edition, you have the ability to create your own commands for more complex actions.
To create your own commands click the on the “Tools” menu in the DragonBar.
Then click “Command Browser”. With the Command Browser open, you can now see a list of Dragon’s commands and keywords. Now click “New” under the “Script” column on the left side of the window.
This will open up the New Script window. Here you can create new commands and keywords, or navigation commands which are called “Step-by-step” commands. You can also create graphics commands.
To make a navigational command, select “Step-by-step” from the command type drop down menu. Then, in the “New Step” drop down, you can select how you want this action to be performed, whether it’s through keystrokes or clicks.
For example when we say “Print file” and Dragon prints a document for us, that’s technically a step-by-step command that includes clicking the Microsoft Office logo, then clicking “Print”, then clicking “OK”.
The Dictation Box
Normally you can dictate with Dragon Medical Practice Edition in any window of any application, however you may occasionally find the need to use the Dragon Dictation Box to take advantage of Dragon Dictation’s command modes, correction modes, and powerful macros, among other helpful features.
To use the Dragon Dictation Box, you can either use the keyboard shortcut Control + Shift + D, or you can use the voice command “Open Dictation Box.”
To record a patient encounter, you may wish to use the SOAP template, which stands for Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan. To use the SOAP template, simply say, “Standard Soap.” You will now see the SOAP headings in the Dictation Box.
In the Dictation Box we can see the beginnings of the standard SOAP template.
To fill a field, simply click within the bracket and begin dictating the text. Using the standard SOAP template, we will click [01]. Remember that if you need to select anything you’ve dictated, say “select” followed by the word you wish to select. For example, saying “Select vital” would select the word “vital” for you.
Any changes or corrections that need to be made can be done directly within the Dictation Box. To make a correction, tell the software to select the words you wish to change, pause for a moment, and then tell the software the new words you would like to use instead. For example, saying, “Select rain” pausing for a moment, and then saying “thunderstorm” would change the word “rain” to the word “thunderstorm”.
When you are finished speaking, you will see your words automatically appear in the Dictation Box. Simply click in the next field to continue your report.
Once you’re finished dictating your material, the text is ready to be pasted into your EHR/EMR (Electronic Health Record or Electronic Medical Record) software. To do this, first click in the EHR/EMR window. You can then use the keyboard shortcut Control + Shift + T or you can say the voice command, “Transfer text.”
To the left is our EHR/EMR window. To the right is our Dictation Box.
We will transfer our text from the Dictation Box to the EHR/EMR window.
Here we’ve transferred the text from the Dictation Box and have placed it into the EHR/EMR window.
If you accidentally pasted the text into the wrong window or field, don’t worry. The information is still saved to Windows’ clipboard. Just click in the window where you wish to paste the text and hit Control + V or edit -> Paste.
Search the Web
One of Dragon Medical Practice Edition’s great features is the ability to search the web for information. If you’re entering data for a patient and would like to know more about an illness or a type of medication, you can search WebMD or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD9) for that information. Or you can do a broader search. You can use any of the following phrases to search the Internet:
- “Find a website about”
- “Search the web for”
- “Search Wikipedia for”
- “Search news for”
- “Search Google for”
This is an invaluable tool for quickly looking up information on something like penicillin, for example.
Licenses & Profiles
Dragon Medical Practice Edition is licensed per user. That means that every different person who uses the software needs a license. You can, however, put Dragon Medical Practice Edition on up to four computers. So for example if you have multiple exam rooms, computers at home, etc. you can install it that way for yourself.
You can also transfer your voice profile to different computers so you don’t have to retrain the software on each of your four computers.
We hope you’ve found this information helpful. If you have any questions, refer to the Help section of Dragon Medical Practice Edition or contact us.
To purchase the latest version of Dragon Medical Practice Edition, buy dragon medical in our online store!
Post By: +Ryan Gaudet
