Dictation software

[BE87]

I am an employed doc in family practice and I am not the fastest with typing. I am interested in purchasing medical dictation software but my employer has no interest in buying it for our whole organization of 30+ clinics, so I am stuck buying my own. For me it’s not about being more productive so I can see more patients, I’m just sick of charting when I get home. I’ve used dragon before in residency and I liked it. Are there any cheaper alternatives out there that you have used or should I just bite the bullet and pay the 1k for dragon? Thanks in advance for the replies!

[jacoavlu]

I’m pretty sure dragon is considered the cheap one. Are you sure it would integrate with your EMR if you bought it yourself?

[BE87]

No I would have to verify that. When I used it in the past it seemed like it was fairly easy to incorporate, you just have it running in the background, put your cursor in the text box of the EMR then hit record.

[SerrateAndDominate]

I use Dragon now in fellowship. Took me a while to adjust but I like it a lot. It has a lot of functions. You can make a bunch of smart phrases that populate by saying short two syllables commands you make.

In residency, out hospital jaded Fluency direct, and it sucked. To be fair to them, I think a lot of it was technical issues and the fact that absolutely nobody in our IT department took ownership of it. So with my minimal technical knowledge, I would emphasize making sure you have good tech support

[sunshine]

If you can chart on a Mac, hit Fn twice and you have a free pretty great dictation program.

[SLC OB]

sunshine wrote:

If you can chart on a Mac, hit Fn twice and you have a free pretty great dictation program.

Click to expand...

My kids do this to "type" their notes! ha! Great idea!

[DocNextDoor]

I started using a voice recognition software in 2000, before EMR days, printing the notes out for the paper charts.

I currently use Dragon Medical One, which is only purchased by large organizations and is cloud based.

Incorporating Voice recognition with electronic medical record can be frustrating as they don't always play well together. It is important to note that the Medical version of Dragon is necessary if you are dictating into an electronic medical record because the software will recognize the electronic medical record and shut off the microphone if none medical version used.

I suggest visiting knowbrainer forum to get more info and ask questions.

[wvwckarate]

We use M*Modal and I like a lot better than Dragon.  I used Dragon in Residency and I'm sure its gotten better in the last 6 years, but this has been great.  Theres an app for it that turns your phone into the dictaphone.  Pretty cool.

[ReFinDoc]

I have used Dragon Home ($79) for the last 10 years for my medical reports. It spelled "amitriptyline" right out of the box, which impressed me.  I always get the disc from Amazon , not the download. Never the latest version. It can be transferred to another computer via flash drive. I use Dragon with a clipboard manager like Ditto for my standard phrases.

High quality USB microphone helps a lot. Learn 10-15 Dragon phrases or get Dragon Nat Speaking for Dummies or something like that. Relentlessly correct your mistakes early on. Periodically I go on Google to watch Dragon tricks and tips.

[Kamban]

Long time before Dragon became popular there was Via Voice from IBM which was a much b better program. Unfortunately it was continued.

Dragon makes you pay for a stupid higher end Medical version just because you have EMR. I have found typing to be much faster than correcting all the errors post dictation. I don't use EMR.

 

[Drop it into MD]

I use dragon in family practice.  I stink and typing and spelling so it fixes both of these issues.  I like dragon much more the the cheaper alternatives I have used.  I used one called Fusion in residency because supposedly this was the only one that would mesh with our EMR.  I am not sure why but it would always enter random words into my sentences.  Unfortunately the word that was entered most frequently was introitus.

 

[aCMD]

I have used both Dragon and M Modal. Currently on M Modal. The health system I work for did a horrible job of the organizational roll out for Dragon- used cheap microphones, poor training processes and poor support- resulting in the change to M Modal. They both have the same issues- I do not believe one is better than the other based on my usage. Recommend checking with your employer to ensure that any dictation program will interface with your EMR- as stated before. We use Epic and I would recommend spending the money to purchase the 'premium' speech microphones. I used one with Dragon and now one with M Modal- night and day when compared to the cheap microphones. You can program the buttons for dictation macros (in Epic parlance: smartphrases, etc.) and they allow for a floating dictation window that allows you to navigate through multiple sections of the chart for review and continuous dictation. Microphones are expensive - my current microphone is around $350 retail but is provided by my employer. I also have a telescribes.

Our organization (we have around 200 physicians and mid level providers plus all the inpatient ER hospital staff - have access) may not like the cost but the cost of unhappy doctors and ultimately the attrition this will cause is worth their investment in our 'happiness'. Additionally they have seen an increase in productivity and chart closure rates - so financially it makes sense too.

Good luck

Greg

[BE87]

Thanks for the replies. I reached out to my employer today and pleaded my case. Hopefully they will see where I’m coming from. Even if I only see one extra patient a day it will still pay for itself over a short period of time. At this point, even if they won’t pay for it, I would buy it myself just to improve my happiness and decrease burnout.

[White.Beard.Doc]

We had some older docs who had meltdowns back several years ago when we first rolled out the EHR.  One doc went home and dove under the covers and refused to return to work.  He wouldn't even come to the phone when his wife answered the phone.  We finally cajoled him into returning to work when we gave him a 20-something pre-med student to scribe, to hold his hand and show him how to enter orders, and to otherwise do his data entry for him.

We did set up dragon on a laptop through the wifi network as a temporary solution until the hospital got around to getting dragon for everyone.  I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have dragon properly integrated with your EHR.  Poor integration makes dragon just ok.  Great integration makes dragon a very powerful tool.  So just be aware, how it is set up and integrated makes a huge difference.

 

[Ykcor]

Can anyone give me the specific name of a premium microphone.

Thanks