MOUNT LAUREL, N.J., June 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MedQuist's (Nasdaq: MEDQ) customer, OhioHealth, based in Columbus, Ohio, has been selected as one of the Top 100 CIO 100 Award winners. OhioHealth was recognized as an industry leader for their implementation and use of MedQuist's SpeechQ for Radiology(TM) voice-recognition software in their radiology department.

CIO, a nationally recognized leader in print and online media, provides insight and analysis on information technology trends to IT professionals and business leaders regardless of industry. The CIO 100 Award celebrates 100 organizations -- and the people in those organizations -- that use information technology in innovative ways to deliver business value, optimize business processes, enable growth and improve customer relations. 'We are delighted to be recognized as an IT leader,' said Scott Starkey, director of Digital Imaging at OhioHealth. 'Our goal was to use technology to provide better patient care, by reducing the time between when patients have an imaging exam and when their physicians have the final report.'

MedQuist's SpeechQ allows radiologists to dictate patient information to create reports, and then immediately edit and digitally sign the reports. That provides reports to patients' physicians and appropriate hospital departments much faster than previously possible. Before they implemented SpeechQ, the average report turnaround time for radiology reports at OhioHealth averaged 30 hours. Now reports sent to transcription are turned around in an average of 10 hours, and self edited reports are often complete in less than 30 minutes.

By documenting patient imaging results in minutes rather than hours, OhioHealth has improved patient care and improved communication between the radiologists and the hospital's referring physicians. 'We designed SpeechQ specifically for radiologists and to integrate with other information systems they use regularly. As a result, most radiologists can dictate their cases and use templates and macros to insert frequently used phrases or even entire reports,' says Chris Spring, MedQuist's director of Speech Recognition Solutions. 'In addition, patient demographic and order information is automatically inserted into the report in the appropriate place. This often reduces the time needed to dictate the report and allows the radiologists to immediately review and sign it.'

'We made a culture change from a legacy dictation system that was no longer supported and required a lot of labor to transcribe our reports to a voice recognition solution that could support our complex needs,' says Starkey. 'With 110 radiologists, multiple locations and thousands of referring physicians, we needed a solution that could easily integrate with our other technologies and be flexible enough to support a variety of workflow options. After implementing SpeechQ, we reduced our transcription costs by $434,378 in 2008.'

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.

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SOURCE MedQuist Inc.