Hello Everyone,
I hope I'm posting in the right area.
I'm a radiologist who covers several different hospitals from home. Each hospital has their own system (PACS) to read images. Each of these systems is coupled with speech recognition software to dictate reports. Many of these hospitals use the same speech recognition software which is called Powerscribe (PS). This is built on Dragon and requires a speech microphone to operate which is plugged into a USB port.
The issue is that you can't have more than one installed version of PS on the same system. This is an issue that is known to consumers, hospital IT, and the company itself. They have no intent to fix this. So, for years radiologists have been using one of several solutions that I know of. Either they create multiple partitions on the hard drive and boot up to whichever hospital they need to cover or they have multiple PCs running which are connected to the 3 monitors via a KVM switch. My current (workable) solution employs both of these workarounds. There are often times when I am covering multiple hospitals simultaneously and being able to switch from one system to the next on the fly is imperative.
I have been looking for a more elegant, one PC solution and have been working with a local IT solutions company to see if we could figure it out. We have landed on VMware Horizon. The IT company built a lab with what I understand to be a computer with respectable specifications. We have installed two PACS/speech rec systems for two of the hospitals that I cover. One is installed on the host computer and the other is on a virtual machine. We have done a lot of troubleshooting. The first issue we had was that we were having difficulty sharing the speech microphone between the host and the virtual systems. We got around this by plugging in a second speech microphone, one dedicated to each system.
We then tested the system with dual monitor output and this seems to be working.
Two questions/issues to start off with:
1) Does Horizon seem like a viable solution given what I have outlined? If we can get through the testing on the lab setup that I am going to invest in a high spec machine to run it on.
2) I am having issues with what I will call "mouse lag" on the virtual machine. When I am scrolling through images, I will often hold down the left mouse button to essentially "grab" the screen. Then, by dragging my cursor up or down, this will scroll through the images of say a CT or MRI. Kind of like the "hand" tool on a pdf. Whenever I change direction (going from up to down or vice versa) there is a very noticeable lag of about 2 seconds where the images will continue to keep scrolling in the wrong direction and then eventually begin to scroll in the right direction. I don't think this is a network issue as the we have no issues on the host machine. I'm wondering if this is just an inherent software issue with Horizon or if it is something that can be improved by better specs (more ram, more cores, faster CPU, faster GPU, etc..). We have VMware tools installed.
Thanks so much for listening and please let me know if I can provide any other details.
