Shahid, The Healthcare Guy, recently added a guest post from Nick van Terheyden, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer (Clinical Language Understanding) from Nuance Healthcare (Yes, they make Dragon Naturally Speaking – DNS) about making the most of speech recognition with an EMR. Here are the major points that Nick made:

• Have the right hardware installed.
• Intelligent application Coexistence.
• Use good quality microphones and sound recording equipment.
• Environmental Considerations.
• Create a Standard and Replicate.
• Anticipate Resistance. Expect resistance.
• Quick Portable Guides.
• Preparation.
• Horses for Courses.
• Identify champion(s).

I think that voice recognition is fascinating. Personally, I haven’t used it all that much. I certainly write a lot and so you’d think it would be perfect for me. I guess the reason I haven’t done it is first that I type pretty fast and second the extra time that it takes me to type the post helps me to formulate my ideas into a more coherent manner.

People are generally surprised to find out that I don’t proofread these blog posts (most of the time). It’s definitely a different type of publishing, but for the most part I build an idea in my head and then formulate the content for the blog as I type it. I’m not sure how well that would work with voice recognition. Although, maybe this week I’ll try it and see how it goes.

This said, I think many doctors have well trained dictation skills and so the idea of using speech recognition to capture their documentation into an EMR is a very natural thing. Hopefully the above ideas will help out those that are interested in pursuing speech recognition.

Choosing a microphone is one of the most important decisions you can make when implementing a speech recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical 10. Thanks to Eric over at Speech Recognition I’ve gotten some interesting information about a microphone called the PowerMic II. Looks like it’s a microphone on steroids. Definitely one other microphone to consider when selecting a microphone to use with voice recognition software. Here’s an overview of the PowerMic II utilized with Dragon Medical 10 thanks to 1450, Inc. with commentary by Jay Goodfellow.

OVERVIEW:
The PowerMic II is a speech recognition microphone designed to be used with Dragon Medical 10.

However, the PowerMic II is much more than a hand held microphone. It is a powerful tool that enhances a physician’s control of dictation and navigation through documents, templates, electronic medical records and other applications. It has been designed specifically to be utilized with Dragon Medical 10, and the extraordinarily tight integration shows that to be true.

Not only does the PowerMic II have full mouse functionality, but there are 10 function keys that are programmable to provide practically any operation that a physician might want to do on his/her computer.

Yes, you can already use Dragon Medial 10 to do almost anything you want to on your computer by voice. However, using the PowerMic II and Dragon Medical, you substantially enhance your ability to do essentially anything you’d like on your computer, using the more convenient method at that moment: voice or function button.

The PowerMic II is designed to be fully functional with Dragon Medical 10 only. Dragon Preferred 10, Professional 10, and Legal 10 are not capable of using all of the programmable PowerMic II features.

Check out the following prices for the various versions of DNS on Amazon:


I’m still looking around for the best location to buy Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical.