Smartphones are making it possible for physicians to do almost anything on the go. With a wide variety of applications, doctors can check drug interactions, search for disease information and even get a patient’s notes transcribed without ever setting foot in the office. 

Two such dictation applications are MyDictation from Zipchart and Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation from Nuance. Both give doctors the ability to manage recordings with a few clicks to their handheld device’s keyboard or touch screen. 

My Dictation allows doctors to create and manage recordings on the iPhone. After creating an audio file, a doctor can upload the recording via wi-fi or cellular service to a secure server.

From there the doctor’s transcriptionist can access the recording and get to work. Finally, the transcribed documents are returned digitally via a secure server to the doctor. The documents can be uploaded to an electronic medical record (EMR) or printed out and put into a paper chart.

Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation is a version of Nuance Dragon Dictation for the iPhone. This mobile application takes the keyboard completely out of the equation. Doctors can use Dragon Medical Mobile to dictate not only patient notes, but also e-mail and text messages. Dragon uses a cloud-based server application, so everything is captured in real time.

Along with the Dictation application, Dragon has the Medical mobile recorder, an application for the smart phone that captures voice recordings. Once recorded, the doctor’s dictation is sent to Nuance’s background speech recognition platform for integration into either eScription or Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System.