Has anyone had any success using microphones other than the standard dictaphone unit with the integrated VR system built into GE Centricity PACS/RIS? Specifically interested in if anyone has had success with headsets, and if so, which ones. Thank you.

We are one of the world's largest vendors of NaturallySpeaking and one of our main focus points is finding the perfect microphone for speech recognition. Unfortunately, no one microphone works the same for everyone and different end users have different requirements so the best we can do is to offer you our test results which you'll find in our Microphone Comparison Matrix which includes all the microphones we have approved for use with NaturallySpeaking and will allow you to compare features, comfort, accuracy and noise cancellation. Don't forget that many integrated soundcards are less than optimal so we typically recommend USB microphones or adding a USB Pod external soundcard to your favorite analog microphone because speech recognition can only be as strong as its weakest link.

http://www.TheMicrophoneStore.com

Thank you for replying. I am not sure that the VR engine is Dragon. The system built into Centricity I believe is based on Powerscribe, however, I know that Nuance also makes Dragon. Nonetheless, I was wondering if anyone had tried and succeeded with a head set, although the only device 'validated' by GE is the dictaphone mic.

PowerScribe is a web-based EMR application that utilizes the NaturallySpeaking Medical 9.5 speech recognition engine with Radiology or Pathology language models. The “Dictaphone” microphone is nothing more than the Philips Speech Mic. There are lots of excellent microphones that work with NaturallySpeaking and offer better accuracy and noise cancellation than the Philips SpeechMic but a lot of doctors prefer this microphone because they are already accustomed to holding a hand-held digital recorder and a hand-held microphone has a familiar feeling. Physicians also like the programmable buttons but this microphone isn't as noise canceling or as accurate as a number of other microphones which you can compare on our Microphone Comparison Matrix.

Most of the posts on this forum tend to range over a large number of DNS topics. To obtain microphone opinions from other physicians you might consider posting this question on a dedicated EMR forum such as KnowBrainer EMR Forum or EHR Forum