Podiatry dictation software for foot and ankle notes

A podiatry clinic day mixes three kinds of note. Routine foot care visits for nails, corns and calluses repeat the same structure many times a day. Diabetic foot and wound visits need a precise record of location, depth, infection grade and pulses. Surgical days need operative notes full of eponyms that general dictation tools have never heard of. VoicePrivate is built for the second and third groups, where a misheard term costs you a correction on every note.

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What a generic dictation tool gets wrong in podiatry

Most dictation software is trained on everyday speech. Podiatric terms either sound like common words or carry surgeon names, so a general tool writes what it thinks it heard. These are real mishearings that the Healthcare Edition dictionary corrects:

Some errors are ordinary English words, so they cannot be fixed everywhere without breaking other notes. "Planter plate", "heal fat pad", "rear foot virus" and "hallux colectomy" are spelled correctly as words and wrong as anatomy. VoicePrivate on Mac fixes these only when Podiatry is your specialty, so "plantar plate", "heel fat pad syndrome", "rearfoot varus" and "hallux cheilectomy" come out right for you while other specialties leave the words alone. With Podiatry selected, the phrase is changed wherever you say it.

What choosing Podiatry changes

In the Mac app, Settings has a Medical specialty picker with 32 specialties plus General. Choosing Podiatry does three things on your computer:

• It gives recognition a short list of podiatric terms to expect, including talar dome, heloma durum, cheilectomy, Youngswick osteotomy, arthroereisis, Hoke triple hemisection, Kutler flap, Weil shortening osteotomy, PEDIS classification and UCBL insert.
• It turns on the foot and ankle corrections described above, such as "planter plate" to "plantar plate" and "taler body" to "talar body".
• A long misheard word that is a near miss of a core podiatry term, such as a slightly wrong "sustentaculum" or "calcaneonavicular", is matched to that term instead of a general word.

All 74,000+ medical terms in the Healthcare dictionary stay available whichever specialty you choose. On Windows there is no specialty picker: the full medical dictionary and its corrections apply to every note.

Notes podiatrists dictate

Example: dictating a diabetic foot follow up

Here is a diabetic foot follow up dictated in one pass, in the order you would work through it. Every bold term is in the Podiatry vocabulary.

1. Click into the HPI box and press Command+Shift+Space. Say: "Fifty eight year old with type 2 diabetes and peripheral neuropathy, follow up of a plantar ulcer under the first metatarsal head left foot." Press the hotkey again.
2. Click into the exam box, press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Ulcer measures 1.2 by 0.9 by 0.3 centimeters, granular base, no probe to bone. PEDIS classification grade 2. Dorsalis pedis and posterior tibial pulses palpable. Protective sensation absent at 4 of 10 sites with the monofilament." Press the hotkey again.
3. In the procedure box, press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Excisional debridement to subcutaneous tissue with a number 15 blade. Intractable plantar keratosis sub 2, pared." Press the hotkey again.
4. In the plan, press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Hallux limitus with dorsal spurring. Continue offloading in the Darco shoe. Discussed cheilectomy once healed. Return in 2 weeks." Press the hotkey again.

Each time you press the hotkey to stop, VoicePrivate transcribes on your computer and pastes the finished text at your cursor. Text does not appear while you are still speaking. It arrives in one block when you stop, so you can read it once and sign.

Getting the text into your EHR

VoicePrivate works with any EHR that accepts a paste, because it pastes through the clipboard rather than through a plug in. Podiatry practices commonly use ModMed EMA, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, Oracle Health (Cerner) and NextGen. The workflow is the same in all of them:

1. Click into the note field, such as the HPI, exam or procedure box.
2. Press Command+Shift+Space on Mac or Ctrl+Shift+Space on Windows and dictate.
3. Press the hotkey again. The text is pasted where your cursor is, and your previous clipboard contents are put back.

If your EHR runs inside Citrix or another remote desktop, the remote session must allow clipboard redirection from your computer. Most IT teams can turn this on per user. VoicePrivate runs on the local Mac or PC, not inside the remote session. The EHR dictation guide covers each system.

Privacy, stated as facts

VoicePrivate processes speech on the computer it is installed on. Audio never leaves the computer and nothing is sent to a cloud service for transcription. Your notes live in your EHR, the same as if you had typed them. Your practice still decides how the EHR itself is secured and what agreements it has with vendors. With Auto-save transcriptions on, which is the default, each dictation is also kept in the app's Library on that computer. Turn it off in Settings if you want the EHR to hold the only copy.

Price

Healthcare Edition is $297 a year or $34.99 a month for one clinician, on Mac or Windows. There is no free trial. Individual monthly and annual plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment. Practices with 2 to 20 clinicians can buy team seats.

Podiatry dictation questions

Podiatry overlaps with orthopedic dictation for foot and ankle trauma, with surgical dictation for op notes, and with radiology dictation for imaging language. If you are moving off Dragon, read Dragon Medical for small practices.