M*Modal Pairs with Optum

M*Modal has announced that Optum will become a reseller of the M*Modal Fluency Direct solution. This agreement will enable Optum to deliver front-end speech understanding technology to a range of its clinical and medical claims coding and decision support solutions for hospitals and physicians.

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. Additionally, these capabilities will improve efficiency by enabling automated and concurrent clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and compliance review queries and responses, the companies said.

"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, in a statement. "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."

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