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The National General Practice IT Group offers advice on common
problems which arise in day-to-day practice
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Your IT questions answered
Voice recognition
Q. I am thinking of buying Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical
for use in the practice. Do you have any experience of using
this product?
I asked Dr Kieran Murphy, GP in Athea, county Limerick for
his advice on this question. Kieran is a GPIT Coordinator
and is a major source of IT knowledge with great experience
of voice recognition. Here is his response:
“I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 for
about four years. I use it to fill in the text portion of referrals having imported drugs and past history with a template.
I also use it for long e-mails or for dictating other types of
documents such as medico-legal reports. I sourced it in
Dublin through a company called CompuSpeak (www.computerspeak.ie) who provide speech recognition software for
radiologists and pathologists.
“The system is very expensive to buy initially, in the
region of €2,000 including a digital voice recorder, installation of the software including a medical dictionary and an
Irish dictionary. There are additional charges if you wish to
create additional users. It requires very little training and
will learn your way of speaking from previous documents
that you have created by scanning them for common words
that you use and common phrases. It also learns as you
speak, so each time you close Dragon it saves a copy of any
new profile words that you have created. There is an ongoing maintenance charge of approximately e200 per year
but for this you get online or onsite support and updates
as appropriate.
“The advantage of this system over Dragon without the
medical and Irish dictionary is the presence of these dictionaries. The medical dictionary contains virtually every
medical term you could ever hope to use including a full
list of current Irish drugs, both trade names and approved
names, and the more complex the medical term, the more
likely that it will recognise it first time.
“The Irish dictionary appears to have most Irish place
names and street names as well as the names of most
Irish consultants, including those not of Irish origin. The
result is that after a short period of time you are dictating
a letter from beginning to end with perhaps only three or
four corrections.
“You can also record directly to a server and allow your
secretary to access the voice file and speech recognised
text and let her do the corrections.”
“You could say that you could type almost as fast as
you could speak but I do not find that this is the case and
find this tool invaluable in creating high-quality communications. I would be very happy to speak to anyone who
is considering acquiring a system. I hope this is of some
assistance.”
NOTE: Please note that Dragon Naturally Speaking will
work in most word processor software, but may not work
directly in your practice software system. Please clarify this
with your GP practice software vendor first.
Electronic cancer referrals
Q. I would like to start using electronic cancer referrals in my
practice software system. What steps do I need to take?
Electronic cancer referrals are available for breast, prostate
and lung cancer referrals. About 20% of referrals to the
National Cancer Control Programme rapid access clinics
come in electronically and the numbers are growing each
month. The advantages of electronic cancer referrals are
that an immediate acknowledgement comes that the referral has been received and a response comes within five
working days with details of the triage category and either
the appointment date or an appointment interval. This
reduces stress for GP and patient alike. Here is what you
need to get started:
• You need to be using CompleteGP, Health One, Helix
Practice Manager or Socrates and have the latest version
of the software installed
• You need to have a Healthlink account, www.healthlink.ie
or phone 01 882 5606
• Your Healthlink digital ID needs to be installed on the
computer that you use to make electronic referrals. The
Healthlink support staff will talk you through how to do
this
• You need a broadband internet connection.
GPs who have used electronic cancer referrals say they
would never go back to using paper or fax referrals. The
electronic referral pulls in all the demographics, medical
history, medications and allergies from your patient’s electronic patient record. Electronic cancer referrals are safe
and secure and satisfy all the information security requirements for healthcare.
Coding
Q. I am coming up to retirement and I would like to learn a
programming language. Any advice?
Take a look at Udacity www.udacity.com. This is an online
learning environment for computer science. You can sign
up for CS101, Building a Search Engine, where you will
learn to code in Python. The course is in seven units, it
is self-paced, free and is a fantastic example of online
learning. It contains videos, quizzes, homework, problems,
solutions, course notes, a discussion forum and, of course,
exams. This course will really challenge you, but in a way
completely different from general practice.
Dr Brian O’Mahony, GPIT group project manager, is pleased to
receive IT questions from readers at [email protected]
but regrets that he cannot answer individual queries
A searchable repository of questions and answers is available
at www.gpit.ie/faq
28 FORUM June 2012
IT Q&As-NH 1
01/06/2012 12:13:43