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Friday Fun Thread for February 23, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Dragon Naturally Speaking has worked in medical environments for a while, and I was able to find a pirated copy at some point.

Eh, I can't imagine it's on par with Whisper, which, if no longer quite SOTA (by like 3 months, the field moves fast), is really goddamn good and fast. Plus Dragon doesn't seem to have an Android app. I have to shuffle between whichever sorry excuse for a PC is free on the multiple wards I cover, so it's not like I have a place to call my own. And I don't even own a laptop.

Yeah most of my coworkers swear by Dragon or some other licensed or free/cobbled together replacement.

Whatever works though.

I know a lot of people subscribe the "you are slow OR you are fast" approach to medical care and documentation, and I'm partially on that train....but if you want to focus on getting faster you will. It'll take awhile (and if you don't have exceptional insight you likely won't notice it's happening until you look back) but you can get faster at typing/writing/dictating.

Figure out what is fat and trim it.*

*Okay I have no fucking clue what the regulatory environment and documentation burden is in India but this is a good skill to get started on now to prep for psych.

I don't look forward to the novel length discharges in psychiatry, I'll tell you that much.

I wonder if avoiding patient names lets you get around the PII issues with using unsecured/public services, though that is entirely a theoretical concern in India. There's the option to turn off chat history in ChatGPT, though I don't know how happy Western regulators would be with it. Nobody cares here, I'm keeping my trick a secret because I don't want the regs to get ideas about making me write even more discharges even faster haha.

No way I'm doing that in the US because "regulation" jazz hands. We'll catch up eventually though, and I know some are doing it. A good EMR and/or dictation fixes a lot of these issues, even for Psych you can automate a note pretty well in Epic. OP notes a bit tricker depending on your style (but dictation works great). IM discharge notes are a shit show if you want them to be not worthless though.

Most long notes that people are write in psych (less so in other specialties) are a nervous habit, or driven by "training." Regulatory/legal/billing/admin stuff is less than you think it is, filling up the whole thing with subjective info is avoidable if you are willing to condense it - use dem writing skills you got.