Press Release Details
For More Information, Contact:
Brian P. Callahan, Chief Financial Officer
(615) 261-1500
bcallahan@spheris.com
Lisa DeMoss
Director, Marketing and Communications
(615) 261-1716
ldemoss@spheris.com
For Immediate Release
Spheris and Community Health Systems Professional Services Corporation sign five-year agreement for all of CHS' medical transcription technology and services
FRANKLIN, Tenn. — October 08, 2008 —Spheris today announced it has entered into an exclusive, five-year agreement with Community Health Systems Professional Services Corporation (CHS), a subsidiary of the nation's leading operator of community-based hospitals, to provide medical transcription technology and services to all of its affiliated hospitals.
“Spheris is honored to have been selected by CHS, and we believe it is a testament to our powerful blend of people, processes and technology,” said Spheris President and Chief Executive Officer Steven E. Simpson. “This agreement further validates our strategy to offer the industry a true end-to-end clinical documentation solution built upon a single, integrated technology platform that is supported by a global network of highly-professional medical language specialists. We believe that incorporating this model into an organization's long-term strategic plans will over time make its entire clinical documentation process more accurate, more efficient and less costly.”
The system-wide transition of the 118 CHS facilities to Spheris' Clarity™ suite of technology and services is expected to take place over the next 36 months. This means that by the end of the implementation roll-out, CHS will be outsourcing all of its medical transcription to Spheris, one of the leading global providers of clinical documentation technology and services. A pilot program with a select number of CHS hospitals resulted in significant overall improvements in both turnaround times and quality. These improvements are results that both parties expect to be replicated across CHS' entire hospital system.
“Standardizing the medical transcription technology and services at our organization's facilities should serve our company's goals to improve quality and at the same time to reduce costs,” said Community Health Systems, Inc.'s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Wayne T. Smith. “I've served on the Board of Directors of Spheris, Inc. for a number of years and have observed Spheris' efforts to meet their customers' clinical documentation goals, including timely turnaround requirements and demonstrable quality initiatives. We are looking forward to realizing the anticipated benefits of our new relationship with Spheris.”
Further underscoring Spheris' competitive advantage in the medical transcription industry is CHS' decision to make an equity investment in Spheris. As a new minority owner in the company, CHS will assume two positions on the Spheris Board of Directors. Effective Oct. 3, 2008, Martin G. Schweinhart and James W. Doucette, both CHS senior executives, joined the Spheris Board of Directors. At that same time, Wayne Smith, who had been an independent Spheris board member for more than seven years, stepped down from his position.
The rest of the Spheris board of directors is comprised of Jonathan Bilzin, senior managing director of TowerBrook Capital Partners - New York; Robert Z. Hensley, former audit partner of Ernst & Young LLP; John A. Kane, former chief financial officer of IDX Systems Corporation; Michael J. King, former chairman and CEO of HealthScribe, Inc.; Neal Moszkowski, Co-CEO of TowerBrook Capital Partners - New York; and Steven E. Simpson, president and CEO of Spheris.
The foundation of Spheris' Clarity suite of products is the newly released Cornerstone transcription and editing application, which includes intuitive back-end speech understanding technology by M*Modal. Clarity is an end-to-end clinical documentation solution that offers a variety of dictation capture options, transcription and speech recognition technologies, customer-facing HIM and physician applications, and distribution methods including integration with electronic health records.
About Spheris Spheris is a leading provider of clinical documentation services and technology to health systems, hospitals and group practices throughout the U.S. Founded by physicians in 1993, Spheris employs a global network of medical language specialists for true 24-hour service, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The proprietary Spheris Clarity™ technology platform integrates the full range of clinical documentation software and hardware into one seamless, customizable system, including embedded speech recognition technologies. The Spheris solution is flexible and scalable to balance the needs of HIM directors, CFOs, IT directors and physicians with an emphasis on verifiable quality, turnaround time, security and pricing. Spheris' worldwide corporate headquarters is located in Franklin, Tenn. For more information, please visit www.spheris.com.