M*Modal and Optum Form Strategic Alliance to Enhance Clinical Documentation Improvement Efforts in Hospitals

FRANKLIN, TN--(Marketwire - Mar 1, 2013) -   M*Modal, a leading provider of clinical documentation and Speech Understanding™ solutions, today announced a strategic alliance with Optum to deliver front-end speech understanding technology to a wide range of Optum's clinical and medical claims coding and decision support solutions for hospitals and physicians. With this agreement, Optum will become a reseller of the M*Modal Fluency Direct™ solution. 

Combining the M*Modal Fluency Direct cloud-based speech understanding platform with healthcare provider solutions from Optum will facilitate faster, more accurate documentation of patient care by linking information from spoken and written notes from physicians, and automating their input to medical claims coding processes. Further, these capabilities will improve efficiency by enabling automated and concurrent clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and compliance review queries and responses.

"The ability to integrate conversational speech into clinical documentation will enable physicians and hospitals to get the most out of computer-assisted coding and other coding applications," said Kyle Pak, senior vice president and general manager at Optum. "Bringing the capabilities of Optum and M*Modal together embeds unparalleled ICD-10 expertise into the full workflow, from documentation of patient care through coding. This will improve the accuracy, simplicity and ease-of-use of the tools that hospitals use to enrich their CDI processes, while simplifying their transition to the ICD-10 coding standard."

The ICD-10 coding system, to be implemented in the U.S. in 2014, brings increased documentation specificity for medical records that identify diagnoses and procedures. ICD-10 will significantly expand hospitals' code base and require additional resources and expertise to implement in electronic health record systems.

"The biggest impact health IT companies can make on CDI is to provide physicians with tools that facilitate more timely and accurate coding at the front end -- during the patient encounter, not days or weeks later," said Matt Jenkins, senior vice president of Business Development at M*Modal. "Together with Optum, we can achieve coding improvements by converting speech to text at the point of care, and by generating meaning from this unstructured narrative to more accurately capture diagnosis, treatment and reimbursement. Speech understanding is the best, most effective path to successful ICD-10 adoption and to enable the transition to accountable care."

Integrating M*Modal and Optum technologies will result in fewer queries to physicians and enable CDI specialists to focus on resolving more complex documentation issues, including gaps in documentation or issues involving clinical clarity.

M*Modal Fluency Direct captures spoken dictation and makes documenting painless and productive by enabling doctors to create and edit clinical data directly within system templates. M*Modal's cloud-based technology can elevate the quality of digital records while making EMRs more user-friendly and accessible. M*Modal offers services based on the experience of recognizing and understanding the documentation of more than 200,000 doctors that rely on M*Modal's cloud offerings every day.

About Optum
Optum (http://www.optum.com) is a leading information and technology-enabled health services business dedicated to helping make the health system work better for everyone. Optum comprises three companies -- OptumHealth, OptumInsight and OptumRx -- representing over 35,000 employees worldwide who collaborate to deliver integrated, intelligent solutions that work to modernize the health system and improve overall population health.

About M*Modal
M*Modal is a leading healthcare technology provider of advanced clinical documentation solutions, enabling hospitals and physicians to enrich the content of patient electronic health records (EHR) for improved healthcare and comprehensive billing integrity. As the largest clinical transcription service provider in the U.S., with a global network of medical editors, M*Modal also provides advanced cloud-based Speech Understanding technology and data analytics that enable physicians and clinicians to capture and include the context of their patient narratives in a single step into electronic health records, further enhancing their productivity and the cost-saving efficiency and quality of patient care at the point of care. M*Modal has been recognized as one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America, placing in the top third of Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 for 2012.

For more information on M*Modal please visit www.mmodal.com or follow on Twitter @MModal.