Dictation for doctors
the honest options
Clinical documentation eats evenings — "pajama time" charting is the cliché because it's true. Voice is the established fix; the question is which tool, and whether you need the expensive one. Informational, not medical or legal advice; confirm PHI handling with your compliance officer.
Two very different products
Dragon Medical One: the incumbent
Roughly $99/month per provider (less on multi-year terms) plus a one-time $525 onboarding fee — about $1,200/year to start (2026 pricing breakdown). For that you get things Blabb doesn't do: specialty medical vocabularies out of the box, deep EHR integration (Epic, Cerner), and a vendor BAA for its cloud processing. If you dictate directly into EHR fields all day at a health system, this category is probably your answer — usually purchased by the organization, not you.
On-device dictation: the other 80% of writing
Referral letters, patient instructions, MDM narratives, emails, insurance appeals — the prose around the chart. Blabb runs speech recognition and AI cleanup entirely on your PC: dictated PHI is never transmitted to anyone, so there's no cloud vendor in the chain and no BAA question for the dictation step (the architecture guide). It types into the window you have focused — including the Citrix/VDI sessions most hospital desktops actually are, though not a window running as administrator, where Windows blocks synthetic input from every tool — at USD $4.99/month, with Blabb Free covering 2,000 words a day at no cost.
What we won't claim
Blabb has no EHR integration and no ambient-scribe mode — and no software is "HIPAA certified," ours included; compliance is your organization's practices, not a product badge. Medical vocabulary, though, is now covered: the Medical edition ships with FDA drug names, NLM clinical terms, and ICD-10 diagnoses built in, and your glossary still learns your own corrections locally on top. If you need Epic integration, buy the EHR-integrated product.
"thanks for seeing this uh thirty four year old with suspected loo poos she's had a malar rash and joint pain for three months on hydroxy clara queen with partial relief"
Thank you for seeing this 34-year-old with suspected lupus. She has had a malar rash and joint pain for 3 months, on hydroxychloroquine with partial relief.
A referral letter, dictated in one breath — with the Medical edition catching "loo poos" and "hydroxy clara queen" on the way through.
For the writing around the chart.
On-device, PHI never leaves the machine, works in locked-down clinical desktops. Two weeks free to test it on a referral letter.
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