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MedQuist Inc. awarded a contract by SwedishAmerican Health System

MedQuist Inc. (Nasdaq: MEDQ), a leading provider of technology-enabled clinical documentation services, announced that it has been awarded a contract by SwedishAmerican Health System, a major healthcare provider with headquarters in Rockford, Illinois, to provide complete transcription outsourcing and speech recognition editing services to the system's hospital and medical center. The contract also includes acquisition of MedQuist's SpeechQ for Radiology(TM) real-time interactive speech recognition system to handle radiology documentation at both SwedishAmerican Hospital and the affiliated FHN Memorial Hospital in Freeport, Illinois, through the two organizations' joint venture health information technology organization -- TriRivers Health Partners. This announcement is being made in connection with the opening of AHIMA in Grapevine, Texas.

In addition, the health system signed a professional services agreement under which MedQuist will perform workflow and dictation process analysis to recommend optimization strategies and "best practices" implementation.

SwedishAmerican projects annual savings of approximately $500,000 as a result of the move to outsourcing and speech recognition, while meeting the system's objectives to improve documentation productivity measures and address a need to replace aging technology. An important requirement for SwedishAmerican was the need to ease the transition for its employees, and MedQuist's agreement to offer positions to the affected personnel proved to be a key factor in the contract decision.

"To meet our increasingly complex medical documentation needs, we determined that a vendor with the scale, scope, and experience of MedQuist was best," said Phil Wasson, Vice President and CIO of SwedishAmerican. "We were particularly attracted to MedQuist's strong speech recognition and technology-enabled services, along with an operations methodology designed to produce and maintain quality output."

"SwedishAmerican conducted a thorough and impressive review leading to this decision that included IT, operations, management, and the medical staff," said Alan Gold, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at MedQuist. "They all saw value not only in MedQuist's blend of outsource services and strong workflow and speech recognition technology, but also in our commitment to a customer care methodology that promotes high quality standards in the production of clinical documentation."

About MedQuist
MedQuist is a leading provider of medical transcription services, and a leader in technology-enabled clinical documentation workflow. MedQuist's enterprise solutions -- including mobile voice capture devices, speech recognition, Web-based workflow platforms, and global network of medical editors -- help healthcare facilities improve patient care, increase physician satisfaction, and lower operational costs. For more information, please visit www.medquist.com.

Source: MedQuist

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