Posted by Kevin Holthaus on January 05, 1999 at 14:54:36:
In Reply to: Re: Medical - Dragon vs. IBM - Which One? posted by Johann Bahlmann on August 18, 1998 at 17:30:47:
I'm an internist and for several months I used IBM Viavoice for Dictating my office notes. I'm currently using Via voice 98 Executive edition on a Dell XPS p2 266 with 128 mb RAM. This is still probably not adequate for voice recognition. To my knowledge there is not an IBM product specifically for medicine other than radiology or ER, and I don't believe this is for the new fluent speech forms of the program. I doubt a special "medical " version will be that useful, and most of my use was with templates and macros I developed from my own note patterns. This has especially difficult for IM since the range of problems is so diverse and the H&P's and notes tend to be so complicated. A urologist may have much better luck since the range of procedures, problems, and examinations are probably not as diverse. You could probably download your old dictations or notes (Ask for copies of your old dictations on disk)to train the vocabulary, and I used my "normal" H&P, ROS, and PE as a staring off point with choices for abnormals on specific organ systems history and exams.
My problem with viavoice after all this work is that the program is still fragile and GPF's are common. The word recognition is very sensitive to your mood, sinus congestion, etc. The support from IBM stinks in that it may take several calls for voice help, or several days to get an e-mail reply. a problem backing up and transferring training from home to office computer never was resolved, so I just train each seperatly. There was not a great deal of time saving
I tried to contact Dragon to see if their program is more robust, and after sending them a note of greater detail than this, technical support just sent me a message to call sales :(! I understand that speech recognition is better with Dragon products. If it isn't substantially better than IBM, which I doubt, I'd use a in house dictation service with macros or write notes for the next few iterations of these programs. Since the ability to train and perform macro's and design templates is the same in the programs I'd have to recommend Dragon only because I have found Viavoice currently unsuitable for the needs of large numbers of detailed notes relatively quickly. Since dictation was costing us $1600/mos,(yes, they charged us per line even for "normal exam") my partner and I are back to writing our notes. Let me know if you wish any help with setting up templates or specific questions, since I have used VV for almost two years. I WOULD like to hear from anyone with experience with Dragon's products please. Kevin