Pro Tips for preserving your old Dragon Medical desktop software
With the discontinuation of Dragon Medical Practice Edition in the USA, many wonder if they can preserve that investment.
The answer is yes, but almost nothing is eternal. At some point, you will lag behind technology. Technology keeps us competitive and makes life a little easier (most of the time).
Here are 5 tips to preserve your Dragon Medical Practice license.
- Do not uninstall Dragon from any computer. (it makes no sense since the license cannot be transferred to another computer).
- Do not destroy your old Dragon computer. If you decide to go to the cloud, a backup is always nice to have.
- Purchase a new computer. Something sufficient to install your copy of Practice Edition and last you a few years. ** You must do this before Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 becomes end of life in order to activate the computer.
- Collect all of your serial numbers. Depending on your system, you can get a copy of your serial number by opening Dragon and on the Dragon bar, click help > about Dragon. This will open a splash screen with your serial number. Take out your cell phone and snap a photo. If you can't get into your Dragon system, try to do a search for "about dragon" on your computer. If found, you can click on this for your serial number. Why collect your serial numbers? Well, we actually do not know when the Nuance license servers will go down. With any luck, one of the servers maybe available and maybe you have an activation left. If you don't have a copy of the installation, you can head over to our media collection for Dragon software. The download is available for free to our current customers but for those who don't have a direct relationship with us, bandwidth costs money and we charge for this bandwidth to access our backup of Dragon Medical installations.
- Add your installation to an in-house Windows server with remote desktop (RDP or terminal services) support. This way, you can upgrade your office computers and use Dragon in a remote desktop environment to your server. This is only suggested for a 1 user system. More users require planning of resources for your server. Dragon Medical Practice Edition is a resource heavy application. Dragon Medical One will save you both time and money in this case. Dragon Medical One is superior to virtualized environments as requirements are 1/20th that of Dragon Medical Practice Edition
While you preserve your Dragon Medical Practice Edition, understand, technology will continue to progress. AI is now being used in many instances to augment patient care including when documenting clinical findings. Don't stay behind too long.