MedQuist, a provider of integrated clinical documentation solutions for healthcare, has announced its acquisition of Pittsburgh-based speech recognition technology developer M*Modal for $130 million.

M*Modal's cloud-based software helps providers easily convert speech into structured clinical information. This improves physician efficiency, enhances the integration of the physician narrative into electronic health records (<a href="/directory/electronic-health-record-ehr" target="_blank" class="directory-item-link">EHR), and contributes to the analysis of clinical information for quality and reimbursement requirements.

[See also: Speech recognition market poised for growth.]

"This transaction combines MedQuist's strengths of capturing the physician narrative, our large customer base, global presence and deep domain expertise in healthcare with the innovations of M*Modal's currently available technologies and strong product roadmap," said Vern Davenport, MedQuist Holding's newly appointed chairman and CEO. "Their scalable cloud-based solutions, Speech Understanding platform, strong technology pipeline and a large team of speech and language scientists and engineers complement MedQuist's clinical workflow solutions."

Together, says Davenport, MedQuist and M*Modal will provide advanced speech understanding technologies and services that seamlessly capture the physician narrative. "We have an opportunity to jointly become a more visible, strategic technology enabler of healthcare organizations as they strive to successfully adopt electronic health records, navigate the move to a value-based healthcare system and derive critical quality and outcomes data from the structured clinical intelligence we create," he said.

[See also: Geisinger partners with Precyse, M*Modal for documentation and billing efficiency.]

"Given the outstanding strategic fit between us, we are positioned to create a whole new level of clinical documentation workflow and analytics solutions that address some of the healthcare industry's most pressing issues," added Michael Finke, CEO of M*Modal. "This merger gives M*Modal the immediate resources and access to customers required to accelerate and extend our technology development efforts."