Like his peers, Dr. William Bisordi didn't focus on typing speed while attending medical school. "I use the hunt-and-peck method," he admits. When a surgery forced him to leave his internal medicine practice (he specializes in gastroenterology), he put his three decades-plus of experience to use answering medical questions on a web site and advising lawyers about their medical cases.

He soon discovered, however, that hunt-and-peck typing wouldn't cut it, not if he wanted to dispense medical advice and compose medical consultation reports in a timely manner. That's when he found MacSpeech Dictate — it served him faithfully and now Dr. Bisordi has moved to MacSpeech Dictate Medical, which includes internal medicine and gastroenterology among the more than 54 disciplines and specialties it supports.

"It recognizes the terms used in gastroenterology, my sub-specialty," he notes. "It recognizes medical terms much better than the standard MacSpeech Dictate software." For example, only MacSpeech Dictate Medical recognizes such words as "electrogastrogram" and "pancreaticoduodenectomy," both of which are found in the gastroenterology discipline.

Dr. Bisordi uses MacSpeech Dictate Medical on a MacBook, allowing him to work just about anywhere.

No More Hunt-and-Peck

When answering questions on the medical advice web site, Dr. Bisordi summons his well-honed bedside manner and behaves as if he is talking to someone in his office and MacSpeech Dictate Medical is his trusty assistant. He speaks his medical advice into TextEdit and copies and pastes the information into Safari, although sometimes he simply says his answer directly in the web browser.

Dr. Bisordi also subscribes to several mailing lists that deliver internal medicine updates and in-depth articles. He uses MacSpeech Dictate Medical to create summaries of the articles, which can be several pages long, and files them away for future use, so he can continue to build his body of knowledge and draw on the information when answering questions. "It saves me the time I used to spend hunting and pecking to write those summaries," he points out.

Time and financial savings both factor into the equation when Dr. Bisordi advises attorneys on medical consultations. He reviews the related medical records and composes his thoughts, which he used to turn over to a transcription service so they could create a report. With MacSpeech Dictate Medical, he saves the money he used to spend on hiring a transcriptionist, which is substantial given that his reports are typically several pages long.

Simple to Learn

"It's fantastic," Dr. Bisordi says of his experiences with MacSpeech Dictate Medical. "The more I use it, the better it is. And training the software took just five minutes, so I could get going with it immediately."

He adds: "It's also simple to learn, so I didn't need to learn a lot of commands to get started. I didn't have to worry about reading the entire manual first, which you have to do with some software. The nice thing about MacSpeech Dictate Medical is you can go through the manual later, at a leisurely pace, and pick up more tips and tricks and commands."

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