eScription Announces Agreement With Eclipsys for eScription's Dictation & Medical Transcription Products and Services.

Business/Technology Editors

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 5, 2001

eScription Corporation, a leader in dictation and transcription management and automatic speech recognition, today announced that Eclipsys Corporation is incorporating eScription's Script(TM) product line into Eclipsys' new Sunrise(TM) Knowledge-Based Transcription product.

eScription provides a suite of applications that reduce costs, decrease turnaround time and improve medical transcription workflow. The applications employ a powerful set of technologies which leverage the Internet and state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition to significantly increase medical transcriptionist productivity. Healthcare providers need not change their workflow of dictating into the telephone handset, nor do they explicitly train the automatic speech recognizer. Using these applications, eScription customers have realized a doubling of productivity.

eScription's products are installed in major healthcare organizations. "Transcriptionists who use our products are able to produce high-quality reports twice as fast as previously was possible," said Ben Chigier, President of eScription. "Our products and services bridge the traditional barrier between dictation and transcription management. The addition of automatic speech recognition automates a significant portion of the work and serves to alleviate some of the significant cost pressures experienced by healthcare."

Over 250,000 medical transcriptionists in the United States transcribe healthcare reports, representing an estimated $6 billion spent per year. The healthcare industry has been very interested in employing speech recognition, but has been slow to adopt it due to concerns over its accuracy and its impact on workflow. "No speech-recognition system, even ours, can be 100% accurate," noted Paul Egerman, eScription chairman & CEO. "To be successful, many concepts in addition to speech recognition must be utilized. Our natural language processor interprets and formats what the physician meant to say in addition to what was actually said."

eScription's Script family of products consists of IntelliScript(TM), the dictation server; EditScript(TM), the transcription and document-distribution product; and AutoScript(TM), the automatic speech recognizer used to produce a draft dictation. Each of these components is tightly integrated over secure Internet connections. This integration provides increased efficiencies and a single management tool from a single vendor to manage all of the major components needed for medical transcription. Transcriptionists can efficiently use the power of a specialized Microsoft Word editor to transcribe reports from anywhere on the Internet with only a dial-up modem.

The significant benefits in transcription productivity are made possible by eScription's patent-pending processes and technology. eScription technology utilizes batch processing of physician dictation using server technology instead of the traditional client based technology. Previous systems for automating medical transcription have attempted to immediately recognize physicians' speech, while eScription's model does not work under this constraint. Like human medical transcriptionists, eScription's recognition process listens to the audio multiple times. This enables AutoScript to clarify what it thinks a physician said based on a larger context and to apply physician- and organization-specific formatting and templates. A near-final draft of the dictations is created for medical transcriptionists to efficiently review, edit and send on to the clinician for verification, "enabling dictated reports to be turned around much more quickly and cost-effectively," said Michael B. Kaufman, Eclipsys Senior Vice President of Business Development. Transcriptionists have discovered that they prefer to edit drafts produced by AutoScript than to type because the work is physically less strenuous.

Powered by eScription, Eclipsys' Sunrise Knowledge-Based Transcription provides information that can be used to populate patient records created with any of Eclipsys' Sunrise solutions, including Clinical Manager (with its industry-leading Knowledge-Based Orders), Record Manager and others. Eclipsys is making the product available on an application service provider (ASP) basis through the company's Technology Solutions Center, "Sunrise Knowledge-Based Transcription is easily and quickly implemented to provide rapid improvement in providing cost-effective medical transcription. This application represents a critically important breakthrough technology," Kaufman stated.

About eScription

eScription Inc., a privately held corporation, is a leading provider of dictation and transcription management and automatic speech recognition for healthcare. eScription's products reduce costs, decrease turn-around-time, and improve the workflow associated with medical transcription by employing a new suite of technologies, including the Internet and automatic speech recognition. eScription's research and development is partially funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

eScription was founded by two successful entrepreneurs, Paul Egerman and Ben Chigier. Egerman has over 20 years of experience in healthcare as a principal of IDX Systems Corporation. He has extensive experience with computerized medical records. Chigier was the CEO and chairman of PureSpeech, a leading provider of advanced speech-recognition software in the telecommunications industry. eScription is based on a partnership and the solid foundation of Chigier's 15 years of experience in speech recognition and telecommunications and Egerman's 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry. For further information, see http://www.escription.com/ or email [e-mail].

About Eclipsys

Eclipsys Corporation - The Outcomes Company - delivers end-to-end information solutions to more than 1,400 healthcare organizations (HCOs) worldwide. These solutions enable HCOs to balance and improve clinical, financial and satisfaction outcomes. The Eclipsys mission of "better healthcare through information(TM)" aligns with customers' goals and strategies of improving quality and efficiency of care. Sunrise(TM), Eclipsys' comprehensive software product line, is built on a single, open, modular architecture - e-healthSOURCE(TM) - and provides industry-leading clinical, financial, health information, ERP and management information solutions. Sunrise solutions are complemented by Web-based integration technology, ASP delivery options, wireless access and network solutions, business process reengineering and full IT outsourcing. In conjunction with its HEALTHvision affiliate (see http://www.healthvision.com/), Eclipsys provides customized, locally branded Web-based solutions to healthcare delivery systems. For more information, see http://www.eclipsys.com/ or email [e-mail].

Eclipsys, Eclipsys Corporation and The Outcomes Company are registered trademarks and Sunrise, Knowledge-Based Orders, Knowledge-Based Transcription and the phrase "better healthcare through information" are trademarks of Eclipsys Solutions Corp. e-healthSOURCE is a trademark of HEALTHvision, Inc. Other product and company names in this news release are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.