Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 vs Dragon Professional

[ Please note: Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 is no longer available. It is now called Dragon Medical One ]

“What are the differences between Dragon Medical 4 and Dragon Professional? Especially given the significant difference in price?”

A good question. Let’s make sure we are comparing apples to apples:

DRAGON PROFESSIONAL

Dragon Professional Individual is sold as a software only license. Professional does not include local NZ based support, free upgrades, installation or one-on-one training. Dragon Professional does not contain a general medical vocabulary – let alone a medical specialty such as pathology, orthopedics, gastroenterology, ophthalmology or any other specialty. Dragon Professional will produce poor accuracy when used with medical terms and drug names. Doctors simply do not have time to mess around trying to teach Dragon Professional 1000’s of new words.

Dragon Professional can only be installed on one computer.

Dragon Professional can’t be made to work reliably with many medical records programs such as Best Practice, Medtech or many other programs.

Dragon Professional can’t access medical records programs via a remote desktop connection. Dragon Medical can easily be configured to access your medical records program via a remote desktop with its special features.

[ Please note: Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 is no longer available. It is now called Dragon Medical One ]

DRAGON MEDICAL PRACTICE EDITION 4

Dragon Medical 4 is a complete system, not just a software licence.

Dragon Medical 4 integrates with most commonly available PMS in NZ.

With a Dragon Medical 4  package you will receive software updates for 12 months, giving you access to new versions continuously through that period. You will have to pay for any upgrade to Dragon Professional.

Each Dragon Medical 4 package includes either remote training or on-site training, depending on your location. This is highly valuable, as without training most doctors will not master the software and that will result in a poor return on investment

Dragon Medical 4 can be installed on an unlimited number of Windows PC’s for the one user. There is a username and login which verifies your licence. So that gives you the flexibility to run Dragon Medical at your clinic, at the hospital, on your personal laptop and at home if you wish. Multiple doctors can use the same computer as other Doctors – as long as they have their own Dragon Medical licence.

Many people think that Dragon Medical is just Dragon Professional with a massive list of medical words loaded into it. This assumption is incorrect.
Yes, Dragon Medical 4 contains 60+ highly researched, specialist medical vocabulary vocabularies, but phonetics and contextual information play an even larger role in increasing accuracy for a specific medical speciality.

Dragon Medical 4 also uses new deep learning-artificial intelligence technology to create a statistical model which understands the relationships between medical terms in a given context. Dragon Professional does not do this – even if you add the medical terms it won’t understand how they are related and this leads to much lower accuracy.

Loading words into Dragon Professional’s vocabulary will not convert Dragon Professional into Dragon Medical 4. It’s Dragon Medical’s deep understanding of the phonetics, context & vocabulary within a given medical speciality that makes Dragon Medical far more accurate than any other speech recognition program.

Dragon Medical 4 provides support for HIPPA (a US standard for privacy and encryption). Dragon Medical 4 encrypts the audio files that it uses. This encryption standard is similar to what is required in New Zealand. This provides protection for you and your patients.

Dragon Professional does not provide any encryption, so you are probably taking a significant risk by using Dragon Professional with any patient data.

Dragon Medical 4 user profiles can be synchronised across multiple computers by engaging a roaming profile on your local network. In a large medical centre or hospital, you will need to be able to access Dragon Medical from any computer. By having a roaming profile, you can access the same user profile every time – ensuring that Dragon Medical 4 improves in accuracy. Dragon Professional Individual does not have this roaming capability.

Dragon Medical 4 has medical formatting rules. For instance, capitalisation of medical terminology as well as expansion of acronyms are very simple to modify. Abbreviations can be used or not. There are options regarding the of ordinals, formatting of ml/cm/Hg/mm, degrees, percentages and other numeric scenarios. Dragon Professional does not have this capability. This will lead to a lot of frustration if you’re using Dragon Professional in a medical environment.

IN SUMMARY

Your investment in Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 will more than pay for itself – in terms of productivity – within a month or so of use. Doctors are typically overworked with the push towards digital medical records. Doctors simply do not have the time to work through the multiple issues that will present themselves if they try to use Dragon Professional in a medical environment. It is highly unlikely that your average medical professional will have the 50+ hours to build a specialist medical vocabulary – only to find that this is only part of the difference between Dragon Medical and Dragon Professional.

Doctors in New Zealand need a solution that will work immediately and is highly focused on their medical speciality. They need the ongoing support, one-on-one training, hardware and expertise to ensure they are highly efficient at using speech recognition within a few hours of having it installed on their computer. DRAGON PROFESSIONAL WILL NOT DELIVER THIS.

So yes, Dragon Medical is more expensive than Dragon Professional, but Dragon Medical 4 provides far more value, greater efficiency, better results for patients, far better interaction with medical record software and ongoing NZ based professional support to ensure Doctors are up and running 24/7 with their new Voice Recognition system.

[ Please note: Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 is no longer available. It is now called Dragon Medical One ]