Speech recognition is still rather a hit and miss, but less so now than before. Dragon products are impressively accurate most of the time - and when it churns out gibberish, it makes for free entertainment.

For professional folk, being able to enter text ‘three times faster than typing’ into whatever application they are using, is a very desirable option. I have seen Dragon Dictate Medical working reasonably well, but is not available for Mac yet - instead, MacSpeech Medical is being marked by Nuance as the Mac equivalent. I was one of the beta testers for MacSpeech Medical. I used to get about 90% accuracy with a good USB mic, and the software, unlike its PC counterpart, insists on having a USB mic. Dragon Dictate (non-medical version) is able to use Mac’s built-in mic however. There is a work-around that allows you to use the internal mic (using two pieces of software: SoundFlower and LineIn), which I have configured on my Mac. The accuracy takes a hit - down to about 70-80%.

You can however improve the situation by using the software’s Vocabulary Training feature. You can dump your legacy clinic letters for the software to chew on (in Word or RTF) and it will find patterns in your terminology and how you put together words. I dumped about 2.5k clinical letters on it, and found thousands of typos that my secretary had made - that apart, it is a useful exercise. I does help the accuracy.

Now I am beginning to use it with my web-based clinical information system ClinicYou, to dictate straight into its EMR text area. Combined with its ability to send automated notifications to linked clinicians, I am beginning to be less reliant on clinic letters.

So, voice recognition with your EMR software, in this case ClinicYou, works reasonably well on the Mac.

Since it was announced, iPad has increasingly gained popularity among clinical communities and eHealthcare aficionados as something of a saviour - its long battery life, robust unibody construction and lightness are very welcome qualities for doctors and nurses on the move on hospital wards and field visits. This combined with a powerful processor, lean apps, e-enabling medical workflows will be a delightful thing to do. I am sure the development community will embrace these positives and come up with some brilliant applications.

Whilst waiting for native applications, some Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems like ClinicYou (www.clinicyou.com)can take advantage of what is already there as soon as the iPad is out of the box. Being a completely web based and cross-platform EMR and clinical practice management tool, ClinicYou should work well with the iPad. And since ClinicYou has a java engine for voice capture, clinicians can dictate medical documents on the go. ClinicYou’s voice capturing is fully integrated with EMR records, ensuring that the dictation goes into the right place in the medical record.

ClinicYou web-EMR is eagerly awaiting iPad. The future of effortless clinical charting, billing and collaboration is already very near.

After months of preparation, ClinicYou, the next generation clinical information system launched in the UK yesterday. This cloud-based healthcare information-sharing system, developed in the UK by clinicians for clinicians, has the potential to transform patient care. ClinicYou is the most advanced web-based practice management system and uses electronic patient records (EPR) that give clinicians instant and secure access to patient data, any time anywhere. It is a breakthrough for multidisciplinary clinical teams who can now collaborate, in realtime, on the same patient record. Visit www.clinicyou.com to learn more.