Proper nouns in Dragon's vocabulary
One of the challenges and for some providers a potential barrier to adoption with Dragon is the ability to have the program recognize proper nouns. The most common example of this in both a Primary Care and Specialist setting is copying a referring provider or party of interest; in particular, last names of referring physicians. Other examples include but are not limited to restaurant names, street names, or towns and cities.
The ideal setup for citing a referring providers name in a Note is to have it automatically cited upon note initialization using a merge field to display it; after being received via interface from the practice management system. If this is not the case then the provider can find his or herself in a situation where they have to dictate it. One complex last name has the potential to hold a provider up to 15-30 seconds; this has the potential to discourage the provider.
There are 2 ways to handle these situations in Dragon:
- After the word has been correctly typed in the Note it is trained on the fly to prevent future occurrences of the same mistake.
Recommended workflow:
- Double click on the word or phrase after it has been correctly typed/added to the note.
- The training dialog box will appear where the word can be trained and learned by the program.
- Compile a list of proper nouns that are not part of Dragon’s standard dictionary and Import them into the program using a text file. The provider can then take the time to go through the list of added words imported to their vocabulary and train them before use. The provider also has the option to train those imported words at a later date and time as well.
Recommended workflow:
- Compile list of words that will be imported into Dragon; a text file is recommended is list format. Individual words should exist on their own lines or else it will be interpreted as a multiple word phrase or noun.
- On Dragon Toolbar --> Words --> Import
- This will bring you to the Add Words from Word Lists import wizard. Follow and complete the wizard to import your custom word list into your vocabulary.