Ever found yourself praying to whatever deity runs Microsoft Teams? You're not alone
- Reference: 1600243388
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/16/microsoft_teams/
- Source link:
In what may come as a surprise to some, monks and nuns studying at the Sitagu International Buddhist Academy in Myanmar can be trained in the dark arts of Microsoft 365 as part of a diploma in computing. Let's hope they learned how to produce something better than the Comic-Sans-heavy Microsoft Publisher efforts beloved by this hack's local spiritualists and general God-botherers.
Thanks to the ongoing pandemic, Microsoft MVP Zar Ni Tyn found himself faced with the problem of getting 250 students through the computing course remotely. A certified trainer, Zar opted for the Teams approach and introduced the pupils to the platform.
The transition was apparently "relatively seamless" despite some of the monks having never even been near a high school. "Microsoft Teams is so simple that anyone can use it," he gushed.
Indeed, assuming, when cranking the thing into life, that the person has the patience of a saint. Or a monk.
The dragon will see you now
Microsoft's miracle-working platform may find some use in the telehealth world with the integration of Nuance's speech-to-text tech dubbed the Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX). With the lofty goal to "improve patient experiences and health outcomes while reducing physician burnout," DAX can take a crack at summarizing the conversation between a patient and their physician during a virtual appointment via Teams.
The physician is therefore saved the arduous task of scrawling illegible notes or frantically stabbing at the keyboard while the patient, who has already had to make Teams work in the first place, groans away describing their pain, the Nuance system doing all the transcribing along the way and pulling in data from the sufferer's electronic medical records.
Specifically, [3]we're told , DAX can make a note of "physician-patient conversations during virtual visits through Microsoft Teams allowing physicians to remain focused on the patient instead of taking notes on the computer," and can "auto-populate a complete and highly accurate clinical note for physicians to review" from the chat. Ominously, we're assured "the physician always remains in control."
Well, good, we're not exactly asking the machine to grab a scalpel and dig in.
Those of a certain vintage may remember the original Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech-recognition product, which has since evolved into Nuance DAX. Nuance [4]lays claim to handling 600 million virtual and live chats per year, with the same technology being used to power the patient-physician transcriptions.
Those twitchy about private medical notes and records being processed electronically and remotely will not be relieved to learn that, according to Nuance
[5]PDF
, "AI-generated notes go through a brief quality review process," checking for accuracy and "appropriateness" before being passed to a clinician to sign off. So, AI is involved... and also human overseers, it seems.One can't help but wonder if the AI has been trained in the art of [6]medical slang .
UBI all the way. ®
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[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mvp-award-program-blog/live-from-the-monastery-thanks-to-microsoft-teams/ba-p/1664564
[2] https://news.microsoft.com/2020/09/15/nuance-and-microsoft-announce-the-integration-of-dragon-ambient-experience-and-microsoft-teams-for-virtual-telehealth-consults/
[3] https://news.nuance.com/2020-09-15-Nuance-and-Microsoft-Announce-the-Integration-of-Dragon-Ambient-eXperience-and-Microsoft-Teams-for-Virtual-Telehealth-Consults
[4] https://www.nuance.com/healthcare/ambient-clinical-intelligence.html
[5] https://www.nuance.com/content/dam/nuance/en_us/collateral/healthcare/data-sheet/ds-ambient-clinical-intelligence-en-us.pdf
[6] http://www.mactheknife.org/Quotations/Slang.html
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Does that mean that, when I log into Teams
the seventy-seven redirect URLs that flash up in the browser are actually Teams transiting through Buddhist hells?
Monks: are they working on
the Nine Billion Names Of God
probably appropriate for 2020
Hospital Slang
A doctor friend of mine had some brilliant acronyms - I was always a fan of his acronym for his obese patients - DTS or "Danger To Shipping"...
Re: Hospital Slang
There have been whole books on it.
Ones that stick in the mind are PAFO (pissed and fell over) and NFN (normal for Norfolk).
Re: Hospital Slang @stungebag
My partner trained as a Theatre Assistant at the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital and, yes, the expression is used even there.
Typical Microsoft
They already use DAX as an acronym for the Data Analysis Expressions in Power BI, and now there's a new DAX with a completely different meaning.
I'll admit that you're not likely to get them confused, but come on, it's a bit of a lack of imagination isn't it?
Re: Typical Microsoft
and don't forget the town in France...
Having been forcibly moved from the mature Skype for Business (lets be fair it's Lync re-branded) to the less than mature Teams (it may be market ready some time in 2022) I can't see why people are still pressing ahead with it.
There are so many things it either can't do, does less well than earlier products or does them but in a much clunkier way than older prodcuts that I get the impression of a very hurried design to implementation cycle and a total lack of UAT. Or maybe just a total lack of disregard for customer satisfaction that it makes Microsoft's previous efforts in that are pale into insignificance.
The problem we have is that the team implementing Teams internally and for our customers respond to complaints about problems with "but look at all these great features". In other words "yes, we know that feature doesn't work very well (or indeed at all) but look at all the bells and whistles that you could be using". To which of course the user response is "we don't actually have any use for the bells and whistles".
Maybe MS should have tried getting the basics right before they moved onto the complicated stuff.
Code Brown
(The medical slang link is worth following)
In IT a "Code Brown" is part of the process leading up to an incident log. It often proceeds the "Java Shuffle" where you rapidly install, configure and remove multiple versions of Java until one works with the awful vendor interface to your horribly expensive equipment. Nowadays you now have 10 VMs on standby with OS versions that have security policies best described as "lace doily".