Dr. Thomas Rohrick — Dragon NaturallySpeaking meets S.O.A.P.
Look Ma, no hands! Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical® voice recognition software, along with Electronic Health Record (EHR) software DC Talk®, creates patient records by voice commands alone.
Dr. Thomas Rohrick, D.C., of Scottsbluff, NE doctr@doctom.net discussed with me in a phone interview his “no-typing” approach to medical records and correspondence: “My use of Dragon breaks down to about 80% for patient records—what you might call “S.O.A.P. notes”, and 20% for dictating letters and email.” (In medical circles, S.O.A.P. stands for Subjective Objective Assessment and Plan, the basic information contained in patient medical records.)
“When I first purchased Dragon five years ago, I could navigate around a computer a little bit, but I was definitely not a whiz. Dragon is pretty easy to use once you get into it, and my local Dragon reseller, Judy Richard, helped me a lot.” [Judith Richard, Pres. of JR Consulting, Minnetonka, MN, http://www.jrconsulting.info]
| "Take the plunge. Dragon is worth the initial investment just to look at it and give it a try." |
“I don’t know if she does this for everybody, but Judy has given me very good support. I think I was also one of her first clients when I purchased Dragon. At the same time, she also supplied me with DC Talk, a medical template and record storage program which was designed with Dragon in mind. You run the whole thing with voice commands. The two products really came together.” |
Not expecting the mention of a software product other than Dragon NaurallySpeaking®, I checked into DC Talk, and I came away with an interesting side-story. JR Consulting was created in 1999 by Judith Richard, who states that while she had been a computer teacher/consultant since 1980, she heard over and over again; "Don't you think it would be COOL if you could just talk to the computer and it would type what you say?" When Judith discovered Dragon NaturallySpeaking® she started her own consulting company specializing in speech recognition.
In 2001, Judith met a software developer in Wisconsin who had created a program for his wife (a chiropractor). The program used Dragon Naturally Speaking® to make a totally "voice activated" database application for chiropractors. Judith started selling the program, called DC Talk, and in 2005 had over 350 clinics installed. In March, 2005, Judith bought DC Talk and hired her own programming staff. DC Talk is constantly being improved and enhanced, mostly based on current customers' input. A brief visual demonstration of DC Talk may be found on this page: http://www.jrconsulting.info/products/DCTalk.html
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According to Dr. Rohrick, “Judy is very caring and very supportive. She shortened my learning curve. There’s no question about it. Many people are afraid of this technology, and that keeps them in the “Dark Ages”. But the main discipline to learn is the control of your own voice. Judy got me up and running on the first day.” |
I asked Dr. Rohrick what is the best way to introduce Dragon NaturallySpeaking® and associated software tools into a practice? He replied, “Take the plunge. Dragon is worth the initial investment just to look at it and give it a try. You’ll never know unless you try it. I know a lot of chiropractors who are afraid of the technology or the time involved, but they spend a lot more money on many less useful things. You can get pretty good voice recognition on just 15 minutes of voice training the program."
Dr. Rohrick added: “In terms of presenting a professional image, Dragon will help you tremendously. There are still chiropractors submitting handwritten notes to insurance companies and the courts, believe it or not. Dragon is a much better way to go.”
Our thanks to Dr. Eric Fishman of
www.EMRConsultant.com , the copyright holder, for permission to run this story. Visit
www.EMRConsultant.com for more information and
Dragon NaturallySpeaking® resources.
Posted
Jul 19 2006, 05:25 PM
by
Nick Harrington