The Dragon® Medical Profile
Today, we want to address one of the main components of Dragon Medical: the user profile.
Your profile is an important part of your practice. Created after installing the application, it collects and contains all of your voice data, templates, and vocabulary. Over time, you may find that you need assistance with some aspect of profile maintenance, whether it’s transferring it to a new computer, restoring it, improving it, or backing it up.
In this guide, we’re going to spend some time discussing areas of Dragon Medical relevant to the user profile, thereby addressing many of the issues and questions you may encounter over time.
Take special note that we are working with Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2, build 12.52.350.048. This version and edition are only available on the Windows operating system. And in this post, our focus is only on local profiles, unless otherwise stated.
What Is a Profile?
We need to cover this ground, at least in brief, so that you know what we mean when we refer to your profile.
The Dragon Medical user profile is the application’s picture of your voice. It includes all of your speech data, distributed across several files and subfolders, stored either locally or on the network, collected within a master folder.
When you open Dragon Medical and see your profile name, the software is looking at the configured profile storage directory and displaying this very folder name to you.
Given that this is a collection of data, working together to transform your speech into text, you want to keep it all together. Adding a source or a vocabulary does not mean that you need to create a new profile. In fact, you want to avoid doing that.
Regardless of the library of words you’re using, or the microphone you’re speaking through, you still want Dragon Medical to have one picture of your voice, not two or three.
Now that you know a little more about profiles, we can talk about how to take care of them. To read more about profiles, sources, and vocabularies, click here.
Profile Maintenance
These are some basic functions that should be well understood by any organization using Dragon Medical Practice Edition to dictate patient encounters. Some of these functions are configured by default; but you will see that they tend to be interrelated and/or interdependent.
Saving Your Dragon Profile
Saving your Dragon Medical profile is a fundamental necessity; otherwise, your new speech data never gets added to the existing model of your voice.
Thankfully, Dragon Medical is set to do this automatically. When you first install the program, the default settings are configured to save when closing your profile or closing the application.
This setting can be accessed from the DragonBar:
Tools > Options > Miscellaneous > When the User Profile Closes
If you want to manually save your profile, you can also do this from the DragonBar:
Profile > Save User Profile
Setting Permissions
If you have problems or error messages when Dragon Medical tries to save your profile, you may not have the right security permissions set. It’s recommended that you have your IT department tackle this task. Here are the instructions on where to look and what to change: Setting Permissions for Dragon Medical
Back Up Your Dragon Profile
Dragon Medical has a built-in backup and recovery system for restoring your profile. If, for instance, the profile were to become corrupted, you could revert to an earlier version. These earlier versions are known as restore points, and are created when Dragon Medical backs up your profile—which happens by default after every five saves.
Be aware that Dragon Medical restore points are unique images of your profile, created and packaged by the application. You cannot use them to recover your profile without going through the restore process.
Backup settings can be accessed from the DragonBar:
Tools > Options > Data > Automatically back up user profile every
Make sure that the Don’t back up user profile box is not checked.
A backup can also be initiated from the DragonBar:
Profile > Backup User Profile
Profile Redundancy
It is also recommended to have a backup copy of your profile saved somewhere else—whether on a USB thumb drive or in a folder on your network.
If you need to recover your voice data, but don’t have access to a restore point, this backup copy is what you’ll use. And you won’t have to use the restore function (as discussed above).
Rather, you can use this copy of the profile in any installation of Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2. Even if you move to a different computer, or have to completely remove Dragon Medical and reinstall it.
Naturally, this backup is created differently than the previous restore point.
Custom Words and Commands
If you don’t export your profile, at least be sure and back up your custom words and commands. That way, if you need to create a new profile, you can still have access to your templates, as well as any words added to the vocabulary.
If you have multiple vocabularies, you’ll need to export the custom words from each one.
Exiting Dragon Medical
It’s important to close your profile before exiting the application, because Dragon Medical has to perform several operations that preserve the integrity of your voice data, including saving it.
We recommend closing Dragon Medical in one of two ways, both located on the DragonBar:
- Profile > Exit Dragon
- Click the green flame icon at the far left and choose Exit Dragon
These shutdown procedures are contraindicated for regular use:
- Shutting down the computer with Dragon Medical open
- “Killing” the program in Windows Task Manager
If you won’t be using your profile for an extended period of time, but you’d like to leave Dragon Medical open, click Profile > Close User Profile.
All of the above will help protect your profile from becoming unstable or unusable.
Get Help With Your Dragon Profile
Why not let a certified Dragon Medical support technician assist you with your voice profile? Click the button below to get support.
Get Dragon Support
Maintaining Profile Accuracy
Here are some areas where you can improve your Dragon Medical accuracy by following best practices:
Accents
If you believe you have an accent, during profile creation, choose it from the list of accents. But if you’re unsure, choose Standard. When you run the optimization process, Dragon Medical will decide if your voice qualifies for one of its accent models or not.
Scanning Documents
If you want Dragon Medical to ingest terms you believe it doesn’t have available, by all means, make use of the Learn from specific documents tool, located under Vocabulary on the DragonBar. Just know that the application has quite a few words available already. Look under Vocabulary > Open Vocabulary Editor to see which words are in your library.
Dragon Medical will add any new words it finds from the documents you provide—including misspellings and terms not relevant to your medical specialty. Be cautious.
Optimization/Accuracy Tuning
This is a process that helps Dragon Medical make changes to your profile based on corrections, training, and other speech data. For most healthcare professionals, running this once a week is sufficient.
You can start Accuracy Tuning by going to Audio > Launch Accuracy Tuning from the DragonBar. It is a time-intensive process, and you won’t be able to use Dragon Medical when it’s running.
See here for more info.
Mic Usage
There’s much to say on this topic. For now, we want to stress two things:
- Make sure to turn the mic off if you are not actively dictating. Dragon Medical will try to produce text or execute a command each time it “hears” something. Leaving the mic on could corrupt your profile—or at least produce frustrating results.
- Don’t let other providers use your profile. When multiple voices speak into one user profile, Dragon Medical can’t discern one from the other, and it ruins your recognition. You’ll have to create a new profile once this happens.
Creating a New Profile
If you’re at this point, it’s because you don’t have a standalone backup, or restoring it didn’t fix the corruption. For as much as we’ve warned you about this, it really isn’t the end of the world. While you’ll lose your voice data, Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2 is very accurate without training.
If you still have access to your profile—or you followed our earlier advice—be sure to grab your custom words and commands. Once you create the new profile, these files can be imported.
Click here for instructions on creating a new Dragon Medical profile.
Profile Migration
Using Multiple Computers
If you want your current Dragon Medical profile on multiple computers, you can export it from the Manage User Profiles screen and transfer it to any computer you have Dragon Medical installed on. Then import it using the same tool you used for export.
Be sure that the profile version and the Dragon Medical version match. You cannot import a Dragon Medical Practice Edition profile into Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2 without upgrading it.
Upgrading Your Profile
If you have a profile you created within two previous versions of Dragon Medical, and you want to use it in Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2, you can certainly do that.
After you install the newer version of Dragon Medical over the previous one, the software will guide you through the upgrade process. This takes approximately 45-60 minutes for one profile.
If you have a legacy profile that you exported, you can import it into the newer version, but you will be prompted to upgrade it.
If the profile upgrade doesn’t work for some strange reason, don’t worry too much about it. Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2 is more accurate than versions 10 and 11. Create a new profile, import your custom words and commands, and continue dictating.