 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
In this issue:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Dragon Medical 10.1 Update
Nuance has announced that version 10.1 Medical is finished and should be shipping by the end of June or early July. This update adds a number of new features to the already impressive feature list of version 10, including:
If you are upgrading from version 8 or 9, you can order upgrades from our webstore. But it may be simpler to give us a call at 1-877-493-7497 and we can figure out which upgrade you need, and see if any volume discounts apply. If you are upgrading from version 10.0, and you have upgrade assurance, you need to do nothing - you will receive an upgrade DVD in the mail. Please note that this upgrade is not available as a download. If you are upgrading from version 10.0, and you do not have upgrade assurance, you will need to contact Nuance's Customer Support at 1-800-654-1187. The cost is $9.95 to cover shipping and handling. The installer is too large to download. You can also access this information via Check Updates on the Help menu of your Dragon Bar. And, of course, if you have any questions, please give us a call at 1-877-493-7497
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Upgrade Specials Continue The upgrade specials on version 10.1 of Professional, Legal, and Preferred continue - but only through June 30th. If you haven't taken advantage of these yet - time is running out!
Not satisfied with your current edition? Want more custom commands, or a legal vocabulary? This opportunity extends to that, as well, and the savings are even more spectacular!
Order online through the above links, or give us a call: 1-877-493-7497
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
3rd Annual "I Speak Dragon" Contest The 3rd Annual "I Speak Dragon" contest is winding down, with entries due by June 30th. If you've got an interesting story about how you use Dragon, go to Nuance's web page at http://ispeakdragon.nuance.com/ and submit your entry. You can win prizes (including free Dragon upgrades for three years). And we'd love to hear about how you're using Dragon as well - feel free to drop us a line at info@zephyr-tec.com - and we can put you in one of our newsletters!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Usability a Key Ingredient for EHR Adoption One of the key elements identified for EHR (Electronic Health Record) adoption is usability. A recent survey by Nuance indicated that 90% of physicians are "concerned" or "very concerned" with usability as an obstacle to EHR adoption. Further, 93 percent of doctors surveyed either “agree” or “strongly agree” with the following statement, “I think capturing physician narrative as part of the documentation process is necessary for complete and quality patient notes.” And further, 90 percent said “access to medical records faster without waiting for records to come out of transcription,” was “important” or “very important.” Of course, you know what we think that indicates - use Dragon! Speech recognition makes it easy for the doctors to add their narrative - without waiting for it to come back from transcription. Making the narrative portions familiar and straightforward makes it much easier for the doctors to adjust to the new workflow. Implementing Dragon at the same time as an EHR is a great way to make that shift more palatable for doctors, nurses, and all involved. In that vein, as of June 2009, Zephyr-TEC has become a strategic Partners with both Allscripts, a leading manufacturers of EHR (Electronic Health Record) software. As such, we have been working with them to help their customers implement Dragon for various practices. And we've also worked with a number of other EHR systems (MedInformatics, NextGen, Alteer, and so forth) - but our years of experience customizing Dragon for just about any software can help you get up and running, no matter what EHR you pick. But a real key here, with most doctors, is the training. We've found that doctors are much more likely to be successful (and happy) with the software with an hour or two of training - it gets them past some blunders and makes them feel more in control of the situation. Let's face it, computers are scary if you aren't used to them (and, actually, even if you are). Whether it's us training your doctors or a program where we train the trainers - don't forget the training! 1-877-493-7497
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Buzzwords With all the constant change in the field of dictation technology, we thought it would be useful to explain a few buzzwords from speech recognition and digital dictation and then give actual definitions. Here's a few more: EMR (Electronic Medical Record): often used interchangeably with EHR (below), EMR is being used more and more to refer to information about a specific incident or treatment, rather than the overall collection of information. EHR (Electronic Healthcare Record) : often used interchangeably with EMR (above), EHR is defined to refer to the overall collection of information about a patient - which is quite possibly in several different EMRs. Meaningful use : The key phrase from Obama's Medical stimulus package: IT products which provide "meaningful use" for health-care providers will be funded by the government. However, the exact specifics of what will be covered is still being defined. Still confused? Send us an e-mail at info@zephyr-tec.com and we'll clarify for you!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Tech Tools & Tips We thought it might be a good idea to look at a couple of Dragon's options in a bit more depth.
The first of these, "Disk space reserved for playback", is the temporary storage of sound so that you can listen to your voice later in the same recording session. When you close Dragon, that recording goes away. For recording purposes, roughly one minute of dictation is 1 MB, so I have it set for ~400 minutes, which is way more actual talking time than I usually do without closing Dragon. The default is 40; sometimes, you will get a warning message from Dragon indicating it is running out of space to save sound from the current session, so we usually set this to a larger number (like 400). The second of these options, "Save recorded dictation with document", allows you to save that recording of your voice permanently alongside the document (only works with Word or DragonPad). It will be saved as a .dra file. You can choose to "Always" save this recording, "Never" save this recording, or "Ask me" whether or not to save the recording each time I dictate into a Word document. For most users, there is no value in hearing what you said when the document was originally created, so "never" saving the voice recording is the most useful choice. In the circumstance where the document is being edited by someone other than the author (for example, a doctor and transcriptionist), hearing what the author actually said (which might be different than what Dragon typed out) could be useful, and you might want other settings here. Finally, when saving your user files, Dragon will automatically create a duplicate copy every so often. The option "Automatically back up user files every # saves" allows you to specify how often that is. Since a new "backup" will overwrite the old "backup", we usually choose to do that once a week or so; that way the backup is reasonably new, but if something gets corrupted in the main voice profile, more than likely the problem has not yet been copied into the backup. In such case, doing a "restore" from the backup will usually get you back up and running quickly. So we will usually leave this at the default setting of 5. As befits a program on version 10, Dragon has lots and lots of options, most of which came from user requests on past versions. The sheer number of choices can be overwhelming, but there's often a solution out there for what you need - and that's where experts like Zephyr-TEC come in! Purchase a one-on-one training session from us, and we can tailor the session to whatever subjects you want - explaining options, troubleshooting problems, custom commands for your favorite program, even mowing your lawn! Okay, maybe not the lawn, but certainly the Dragon bits ... call us and find out more, or purchase a session online!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
©2009 Zephyr-TEC Corp, 9631 Business Center Dr. Suite B, Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91730.
909-481-9991. All rights reserved.