My name is Brian and I work at Yale. We have had some integration issues and the people at NCH have been very responsive. What started as a request for fixes has turned into something more... We have received weekly updates (and betas of Dictate and Scribe) so we can follow the NCH development process. While I can't speak about what is new or changed, I can tell you about our setup at Yale and some of the issues we have faced.
We are in a clinical setting and have Faculty and Residents dictating cases (about 40 stations; 200 dictations daily). All computers are Mac based. Most are intel-Macs running 10.5.x; the rest are PPC running 10.4.11. Microphones are the "Buddy" USB variety. Foot pedals are the VPC models that NCH recommends. We also have barcode scanners to help enter case information.
Issues with the dictation stations are few, but important to fix. 1) the left/right foot pedals also activate the center pedal (we are looking at alternatives; users for now are very careful) 2) Express Dictate gets "reset" and old and new dictations get mixed up (if the app crashes twice, the OS offers to create a new prefs file. This also resets Dictate's internal counter and causes issues. We have asked people to click "Close" instead of "Try Again" if the dialog appears)
The dictations are sent to a file server, processed, and then made available in a shared area for our Transcriptionists. We have about 10 stations. The transcriptionists "Load and Delete" one or more cases and then transcribe them into our clinical system. Again, all are Macs (some intel, some PPC, most 10.5.x, some 10.4.11). We have had a number of issues with switching from "Lanier" to Express Scribe. 1)During the last few seconds of the dictation, the user is unable to enter text (we ask people to say "this is the end of the dictation" to remedy this) 2)Dictations can't be sent back to the server 3)Changing speed of dictation creates a "robotic" (hard to listen to) voice 4)As above, foot pedals are difficult to use.
We have sent NCH a list of issues and they are working to resolve them. Some of the issues listed above have been addressed in the betas we have used. It is possible that ALL our issues will be addressed (except the foot pedals) by the time the software is released... time will tell. But it is very clear that NCH is working hard to get Dictate and Scribe updated and we are excited to use the new versions!