The difference between Dragon Medical and Dragon Professional?
A good question. Let’s make sure we are comparing apples to apples:
DRAGON PROFESSIONAL
Dragon Professional does not include Australian support, free upgrades, one-on-one training, EHR integration or a digital microphone when you buy a $500 licence. With training, setup, 12 months support and a microphone a Dragon Professional package is about $1300 - so about 80% of the cost of a complete Dragon Medical solution.
Dragon Professional does not contain several medical vocabularies - 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 teach Dragon Professional thousands of new words.
Dragon Medical One is not simply Dragon Professional plus medical terms. It is a completely new, next generation cloud-based platform which uses machine learning to understand the context and relationship between medical terms. You can't make Dragon Professional into Dragon Medical. Different technologies are being used. Dragon Medical One is two generations ahead of Dragon Professional 15.
Would you buy a new iPhone that had five-year-old technology? No you wouldn't. You'd buy the latest tech.
Dragon Professional can only be installed on one computer. You will have to buy additional licences for each computer.You will have to pay for any upgrades to Dragon Professional. Dragon Medical One has completely free upgrades. And because of the advanced nature of the technology, upgrades are being delivered to the cloud frequently.
Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional can’t be made to work reliably with medical records programs such as Genie, Best Practice, Medical Director, Shexie, Health Track, VIP, Core Plus, Gentu, Clinic to Cloud and 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 (even from an Apple Mac).
Dragon Medical One is a complete dictation system, not just a software licence.
With a Dragon Medical One system you will receive software updates for 12 months, giving you access to new versions continuously through that period.
A special iPhone or android app is included with each package which allows you to use your phone as a wireless input device.You will have to buy a high quality microphone to get good results out of Dragon professional. This will cost you between $200 and $500.
Each Dragon Medical 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 One can be installed on an unlimited number of Windows PC’s (or servers). 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.
Dragon Medical One 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.
Dragon Medical includes security and encryption that meets the Australian standard. Dragon Medical One is hosted in Australia and meets all requirements under Australian law. This provides protection for you and your patients.
Dragon Professional does not provide any encryption, so you may be taking a significant risk by using Dragon Professional with any Australian patient data.
Dragon Medical One voice profiles are synchronised across the cloud. In a large medical centre or hospital, you will need to be able to access Dragon Medical from any computer. By having a cloud profile, you can access the same user profile every time - ensuring that Dragon Medical One improves in accuracy. Dragon Professional Individual does not have this roaming capability.
Dragon Medical One 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.
SUMMARY
Doctors simply do not have the time to work through the multiple issues if they try to use Dragon Professional in a medical environment. It is highly unlikely that your average medical professional will have the 100+ hours to build a specialist medical vocabulary - only to find that this is only a small part of the difference between Dragon Medical and Dragon Professional.
Your investment in Dragon Medical One 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 in Australia 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.
Dragon Medical Cloud provides far more value, greater efficiency, better results for patients, far better interaction with your medical record software and ongoing Australian professional support to you are up and running 24/7 with this new Voice Recognition system.