JPMorgan Chase's private investment arm One Equity Partners will acquire voice-to-text clinical documentation company MModal for about $1.1 billion.
JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s private investment
arm One Equity Partners has agreed to acquire
MModal,
a developer of clinical transcription software, for approximately $1.1 billion,
or $14 per share.
In addition to media properties such as
TV Guide, One Equity Partners invests in
health care vendors, including Wright Medical Group, an orthopedic implant
company, and Apollo Health Street, a business process outsourcer. In
technology, One Equity Partners has stakes in IP infrastructure and application
provider Genband and network security firm Mandiant.
Announced on July 2, the deal is expected to
close during the third quarter of 2012.
An MModal spokesman declined to comment on
the acquisition beyond the company's release.
"One Equity Partners matches our passion
and drive, and we believe will be the right financial partner to accelerate our
strategic goals and further enhance our leadership position as the entire
industry focuses on improving the cost and quality of care," Vern
Davenport, chairman and CEO of MModal, said in a statement.
The JPMorgan Chase unit will purchase all
outstanding shares of MModal.
MModal offers a cloud-based platform called
Speech Understanding, which uses natural-language processing to analyze a
doctor's speech and converts it into text.
"Our focus is and will continue to be on
serving customers through our clinical documentation services and Speech
Understanding solutions that unlock value from the 'unstructured' clinical narrative,"
said Davenport.
On June 12,
MModal
unveiled Catalyst, a suite of software that comprises Catalyst for Quality
and Catalyst for Radiology. Catalyst for Quality uses speech recognition to
allow health care executives to improve the quality of documentation to satisfy
federal mandates on meaningful use of electronic health records. Catalyst for
Radiology allows radiologists to find clinical information within radiology
documents.
"MModal presents a unique opportunity to
acquire a market leader in clinical documentation at a time when the company
has successfully released its new generation of speech understanding solutions
for health care," Dick Cashin, managing partner of One Equity Partners,
said in a statement.
The cloud capabilities of MModal's Speech
Understanding platform could help accelerate analytics for clinical language
understanding of big data, said Shahid Shah, CEO of IT consulting firm
Netspective Communications and author of the
Healthcare
IT Guy blog.
"In general, the acquisition is a good
thing because it gives MModal access to more capital," Shah told
eWEEK
in an email.
With the "Obamacare" legislation,
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
upheld
by the Supreme Court on June 28, the health care industry is moving to more
of a payment model based on outcomes rather than fee for service. As a result,
the speech-to-text documentation capabilities of software like MModal's to comb
medical data will be important, according to Shah.
"If the proper attention is provided and
enough money is pumped into MModal, it could really help shake up the
speech-recognition market in health care at a time when fee for service is
switching to outcomes-driven and performance-focused care," said Shah.
"When dealing with performance and outcomes-based care, medical data
matters more than it does in the fee for service model."
In addition to Catalyst,
MModal
introduced Fluency, a cloud-based speech-to-text platform, on May 9.
Fluency is a set of applications that allow doctors to dictate narratives about
a patient's condition and flow the data into EHRs.
Fluency can even pick up accents, dialects
and cadence in a doctor's speech, according to MModal.
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