Dragon

On Monday morning at dawn I drove to Tacoma to learn to use Dragon, our voice recognition software. That brief experience was transformational and how I think about using technology in my daily practice. It is clear that one can perform every imaginable computer operation without the use of one hands. I don't think however become that skilled, but I certainly can use voice recognition to do my daily work better and faster.

I type pretty quickly, but my keyboard rate simply doesn't compare to the roughly 120 words/min I can accomplish with voice recognition.

One of the things I learned today in a one-on-one training session with Ed Rosenthal is that we can share voice commands -- basically verbal dot phrases -- the same way we share keyboard dot phrases. These voice commands are saved as a series of files into shared location that anyone who uses voice recognition software at Burien can access.

An example: The neti pot phrase I recently shared on this blog can be packaged into a voice command, something like "dot neti pot" that would then spit out an extended list of neti pot instructions. If you wanted to use this phrase in Dragon, you would simply import it into your own Dragon profile from the shared drive.

Another example: Dragon can be taught to recognize, and spell correctly, complex and commonly used names. This morning, I taught Dragon to recognize one of our orthopedics specialists with a difficult to spell name. Doing this will ultimately save me time in my documentation.

I just begun to learn all of the things that voice recognition software can do. Very exciting!

The only challenge I have really encountered thus far is the software's tendency to misrecognize some common nonmedical language. So please excuse me if there is anything above that doesn't make sense--I'm voice-blogging this entry...Dragon blogging...dragogging?

My new mantra: speak, don't type.