Speech Recognition With General and Medical Vocabularies Revisited II

A Google search on “mba md programs” brings back over 12 million results, many of which are the particulars of the hundreds of MD/MBA programs now offered by leading universities.

This means that medical practices are now incorporating modern business models and that, in turn, means that practice managers and their accountants are not only looking for ways to cut costs as they have in the past but are now also looking for ways to establish new profit centers. Many times, speech-to-text tools like Dragon Medical Practice Edition provide the solution to one or both.

Nuance will this month release Dragon Medical Practice Edition, an upgrade to its medical speech recognition tool for small offices that should even further reduce transcription costs by making it easierier to enter data into an EHR.

Dragon Medical Practice Edition is similar to Nuance's existing Dragon speech recognition options for health care in that it allows health care workers to create medical notes directly in an EHR system in real time.

The new version has a number of time-saving features: for example, it alerts the user and offers advice when a poor audio input caused by incorrect microphone connection or background noise is detected. And that’s just the beginning.

Existing and new users can click here for the results of a YouTube search on “Dragon Medical Practice Edition”

These voice-translation videos fall roughly into the following three categories:

• Technical topics such as profile optimization

• Nuance and other tutorials

• Case studies narrated by practicing physicians

These YouTube videos and my prior posts on speech-to-text translation offer a pretty comprehensive introduction to speech recognition software in general and Dragon Medical software in particular. Check them out.

Speech Recognition With General and Medical Vocabularies Revisited

A while ago, back on May 10, 2009, I posted an article that discussed speech recognition software in general and Dragon Medical 10 in particular. Click here to navigate to that post. In the two years plus since then, the field of speech-to-text translation (and the hardware available for speech-to-text translation software to execute on) has advance. This can be seen in the research reports published at the Special Interest Sites that you can navigate to from the links at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.



Reflecting these advances, Vendors, Nuance Communications Inc., the maker of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Dragon Medical Practice Edition, in particular, have been able to release improved versions of their products: The next version of Dragon Medical will be called “Dragon Medical Practice Edition” and will feature the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Speech Engine. I have found it to be faster and more accurate than any previous version of Dragon. (The most recent versions utilize new hardware features such as multithreading and multicore CPUs, and they double the sampling rate and more).

That said, it's still important that you use any speech-to-text translation product with a good sound card and a good microphone.

Click here for a downloadable Product Sheet

Click here for a Feature and Specs Sheet

As is my wont, I recently installed a pre-release copy of Dragon Medical Practice Edition hurriedly: that is, I wasn’t very careful when I built a profile (trained Dragon) and then gave Dragon an initial test run by speaking into a 10-year-old, $5.95 microphone that happened to be connected to my sound card at the time. The idea was simply to familiarize myself with this new edition a little before using it seriously later. To my astonishment, even with this primitive set up, Dragon Medical Practice Edition converted my speech to text without a single error throughout a 5-minute run (using the General vocabulary).

There's an awful lot of information about this new version to sift through. Nuance's site (click here) is a good place to start.



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As a footnote, I want to add that systems that convert spoken words to text are not just of value to professional practices. I have an acquaintance who has used this software for over a year as he has had a stroke and finds it difficult to type. He speaks well of it.

Web Ontology Language 2 - A new version of a standard for representing knowledge on the Web

Today, W3C announced a new version of a standard for representing knowledge on the Web. OWL 2, part of W3C's Semantic Web toolkit, allows people to capture their knowledge about a particular domain (say, energy or medicine) and then use tools to manage information, search through it, and learn more from it.

Furthermore, as an open standard based on Web technology, it lowers the cost of merging knowledge from multiple domains.

Communities organize information through shared vocabularies.

Booksellers talk about "titles" and "authors," human resource departments use "salary" and "social security number," and so on. OWL is one W3C tool for building and sharing vocabularies.

Consider the application of OWL in the field of health care. Medical professionals use OWL to represent knowledge about symptoms, diseases, and treatments. Pharmaceutical companies use OWL to represent information about drugs, dosages, and allergies. Combining this knowledge from the medical and pharmaceutical communities with patient data enables a whole range of intelligent applications such as decision support tools that search for possible treatments; systems that monitor drug efficacy and possible side effects; and tools that support epidemiological research.

As with other W3C Semantic Web technology, OWL is well-suited to real-world information management needs. Over time, our knowledge changes, as does the way we think about information. It is also common to think of new ways of using data over time, or to have to combine data with other data in ways not initially envisioned (for example, when two companies merge and their data sets need to be merged as well). OWL is designed with these realities in mind.

OWL can lower software development costs as well by making it easier to design generic software (search tools, inference tools, etc.) that may be customized by simply adding more OWL descriptions. For instance, one simple but powerful feature of OWL is the ability to deduce two items of interest as being "the same" — for instance, that "the planet Venus" is the same thing as "the morning star" and as "the evening star." Knowing that two items are "the same" allows smart tools to infer relationships automatically, without any changes to software.

The new features in OWL 2 are based on the features people most requested after using OWL 1. OWL 2 introduces OWL profiles, subsets of the language that offer easier implementation and use (at the expense of expressive power) designed for various application needs.

To get started with OWL 2, see the OWL 2 Overview (click here) and OWL 2 Primer (click here).