Does speech recognition know medical terms?

If you work in the healthcare sector and you’re looking for speech recognition software to make your job a little easier, there’s probably one question in your mind more than any other… does speech recognition know medical terms?

It’s a question worth asking; while all modern speech recognition solutions are trained on a wide vocabulary of day-to-day terms, most solutions would struggle when it comes to complex medical jargon.

But Nuance Dragon Medical One (DMO) is trained not just on everyday vocab, but all manner of medical terms as well. That’s why it’s the go-to speech recognition solution for medical professionals. In today’s blog, we’ll be breaking down the basics of DMO, as well as answering other questions you might have about medical dictation.

Nuance Dragon Medical One: trained on medical jargon

With the NHS under strain (and having been under strain for years now), most healthcare professionals are significantly snowed under right now. This is due, in no small part, to mountains of manual paperwork.

It’s Dragon Medical One’s job to make those mountains manageable. This is made possible, first and foremost, by medical dictation. Without this tech, healthcare professionals have no choice but to manually type out all their paperwork, which includes any notes they take during a consultation with a patient.

DMO can save collective hours by automatically transcribing everything that is said throughout the consultation. This means that, even if there’s the odd mistake in the transcription, it will still paint a comprehensive picture of the consultation, with the healthcare professional never having to lift a finger.

It’s in these transcriptions that DMO proves more effective than other speech recognition platforms. Because it’s trained on medical jargon, it’s unlikely to be stumped by anything said throughout any given consultation- even if there’s overlapping speech.

Can healthcare professionals use speech recognition that hasn’t been trained on medical vocab?

There’s technically nothing stopping healthcare professionals from using speech recognition software that isn’t tailored to healthcare, but when it comes to the more complex jargon, you may not be able to completely rely on the dictation platform, and will instead have to type out certain terms yourself (or go back and make corrections later). Switching between dictating and manually typing might not be a dealbreaker, but with Dragon Medical One (particularly once you’re used to using the platform), you won’t have to lift a finger to complete your documentation. Even going back and editing can be done entirely with your voice.

Can you use Dragon Medical One outside of the healthcare sector?

Again, there’s nothing stopping you using Dragon Medical One in other sectors. But if you know you’re never going to need medical jargon in your work, there are a number of alternative solutions that might suit you, and your organisation, better. At Voice Technologies, we offer speech recognition products for the legal sector, emergency services, government, and professional services.

What other features does Dragon Medical One offer?

It’s not just dictation that makes Dragon Medical One the ideal option for healthcare professionals. Other features include:

• Smartphone compatibility, allowing you to take transcriptions on the go.
• DMO automatically accounts for different accents, so no voice profile training is required. This makes it all the easier to use automated transcriptions straight out of the box. 
• You’ll also have access to analytics that will show you just how much time you’ve been saving every week by using speech recognition rather than typing. On average, that’ll be 50% less time spent on documentation.

We help organisations reduce the time and cost of producing correspondence via speech recognition software, information workflow apps, and digital dictation hardware & software. Think we could help your business? Book a consultation today.