Medical Version? -

From calgary: I am in an office where I use iListen and my partner uses Dragon. There is no doubt that the Dragon system is currently better than iListen. I have spent a year training iListen and I am very happy with the current results. I have not used a medical package but have trained iListen with my ongoing dictations as well as thousands of prior letters. Like most specialties, the language that I use is very unique but iListen actually manages the unique words extremely well. It has problems with possessives, small words, rapidly spoken phrases rather than the peculiar syntax of the specialty. I am committed to a Mac sponsored continuous speech package so I continue with iListen and I am happy with my results on the extensively trained voice profile. There is lots of room for improvement (evident watching my office partner) and I am hoping for a major version upgrade to address some of the obvious issues.
The whole issue is time and efficiency. I can dictate and edit a letter once and it is ready for mailing. Even though the process takes longer than simply dictating - there is no transcription, no second editing and fewer delays in getting a consult to the referring source. It has improved the delay in getting consults out substantially. It takes more time up-front but there is an enormous saving in time and efficiency once the system is up and running.

Bottom line - it actually doesn't take much time to set up your own medical version just by dictating a few letters, correcting and using "learn my writing" (or whatever it is called). I have also used ViaVoice in the past and, once trained, iListen is much better.

a fellow Canuck

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Sunday, January 29 2006 @ 12:43 PM PST

Medical Version? - theChuck

We elected not to offer a medical vocabulary. This was a decision made after careful consideration of the pros and cons.

But our software does offer the capability of adding new words en masse via its "Learn My Writing Style" feature. With this feature a physician can have iListen analyze documents they have previously written and it will add all the new words it finds to its vocabulary.

The advantage of this method is that the words are learned in context, which improves the odds that they will be recognized when spoken in the future. We believe this to be far better than offering a medical vocabulary, which would pollute one's profile with up to 15,000 words (the doctors we have spoken with tell us they would use between 500-1000 technical terms for their discipline at most).

Chuck Rogers, Chief Evangelist
MacSpeech, Inc.

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Sunday, March 05 2006 @ 12:56 PM PST

Medical Version? - jhlyn

Amen to Chuck's comment above. I have suffered through several apps to try to limit the number of dictations sent out by our practice. This process started in 1995 when I paid about two thousand bucks for one of the first commercially available speech recognition programs. (I also had to buy a PeeCee just to run it -- yuck) (I actually don't recall the exact price of the program, but the software cost me much more than the PC I needed to run it did.) My experience with this and with subsequent apps, including most recently Via Voice for Mac, revealed one consistent finding. I have always noticed that these programs do a MUCH better job of recognizing technical medical terminology than simpler and more common words. For example, once trained, all of my apps had little trouble properly transcribing a phrase like "dysfunctional fenestrated endothelium". However, just try to transcribe a phrase like "I took two to the store, too", and you will find yourself reaching for the keyboard before the full sentence appears on the screen.

The lesson here for all of us medical types is that we don't have to be unduly concerned about our technical terminology when considering a speech recognition program. You must first undertake the initial task of training the program properly. Once that's done, you'll have the program eating out of your hand.

When my colleagues pooh-poo'd my (unfortunately premature) foray into voice recognition, I really surprised them using this knowledge. You can do the same thing. Just sit down at your desk and rattle off a sentence full of the most technical terms you can think of. If you have properly trained your Mac, the perfectly transcribed sentence that pops up will have your friends gaping like goldfish.

A. Ottnstein, MD

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Wednesday, November 01 2006 @ 07:34 PM PST

Medical Version? - mafischer1

Hello from another Canadian doctor, this time a Urologist in Ontario. I am considering moving to an EMR, probably practice solutions EMR aka MacMedical. I would like to use iListen also but am a little concerned about its abilities vs Dragon 9. In addition to the helpful comments in the previous postings, are the any resources on the internet about how to train iListen to do medical dictation as accurately as possible?

Thanks for your help

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Wednesday, May 16 2007 @ 02:19 PM PDT