The Claro Group Announces Strategic Alliance With M*Modal to Drive Clinical Documentation Improvements and Ease ICD-10 Transition for Healthcare Provider Organizations

CHICAGO, IL--(Marketwire - Mar 1, 2013) - The Claro Group, LLC, providers of management consulting and financial advisory services to hospitals and health systems, today announces a strategic alliance with M*Modal, a leading provider of clinical documentation and Speech Understanding™ solutions, to help acute care hospitals improve clinical quality and maximize revenue cycle performance. The strategic alliance will enable The Claro Group to offer its clients additional advisory services powered by the M*Modal Catalyst™ analytics software platform.

The Claro Group will use this enhanced technology capability to deliver increased value to its clients in the areas of quality measures and revenue leakage, and to further facilitate an efficient transition to ICD-10, a new clinical coding standard due to be implemented across the U.S. in 2014. Physicians and healthcare professionals will benefit from more choice to help them identify and address clinical documentation improvement (CDI) opportunities.

Venanzio Arquilla, Managing Director and Healthcare Practice Leader, The Claro Group, said: "We are very excited to collaborate with M*Modal and offer its innovative suite of software solutions. Hospitals are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate quality through accurate capture of the patient encounter in order to get properly reimbursed.

"We already have a proven track record of helping hospitals improve their operational performance, reduce compliance risk and drive accurate reimbursement through our CDI Insight® services. We believe that M*Modal's speech and natural language understanding technology is a perfect complement to our focus on working with our clients to implement best-practice CDI and HIM processes, technology and infrastructure."

"We are delighted to welcome The Claro Group as a strategic partner. By combining Claro's extensive revenue cycle and best-in-class CDI consulting expertise with M*Modal's capabilities in Natural Language Understanding and unstructured data analytics, we can enable healthcare systems to unlock financial and clinical value from physician clinical documentation," said Vern Davenport, CEO of M*Modal. "Through this alliance, customers can leverage expertise from both companies to achieve accurate reimbursement, improve quality ratings, and maintain compliance with CMS rules and regulations."

The Claro Group has deep expertise in increasing profitability and the competitive position of hospitals and health systems through improving quality and other operating metrics, strategic cost reduction and enhanced revenue realization. The Claro Group's professionals have worked with more than 500 hospitals and health systems to deliver tangible, sustainable results, including realization of over $1.4 Billion in additional net revenue or cost reduction for healthcare providers.

M*Modal Catalyst™ solutions aggregate clinical documents from across an enterprise to reveal insights and make clinical information embedded in narrative text quickly available and shareable. With M*Modal Catalyst™, healthcare providers can identify, address and prevent documentation deficiencies with immediate feedback to create complete, compliant, structured and encoded documentation.

About The Claro Group

The Claro Group, LLC is one of the nation's top privately owned management consulting firms with offices in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Founded in 2005 by former Big 5 accounting and consulting firm partners, The Claro Group, one of Consulting Magazine's "Seven Small Jewels," provides financial and management consulting services focused on financial advisory services (corporate recovery services, insurance claims, litigation support) and business improvement consulting (strategic sourcing/procurement and healthcare provider solutions, including clinical documentation, strategic cost reduction, charge capture, revenue cycle and ICD-10 consulting services). For additional information, including an overview of business solutions, client case studies and career opportunities, visit The Claro Group's website at www.theclarogroup.com.

About M*Modal and MModal Inc.
M*Modal is a leading healthcare technology provider of advanced clinical documentation solutions, enabling hospitals and physicians to enrich the content of patient electronic health records (EHR) for improved healthcare and comprehensive billing integrity. As the largest clinical transcription service provider in the U.S., with a global network of medical editors, M*Modal also provides advanced cloud-based Speech Understanding technology and data analytics that enable physicians and clinicians to capture and include the context of their patient narratives in a single step into electronic health records, further enhancing their productivity and the cost-saving efficiency and quality of patient care at the point of care. M*Modal has been recognized as one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America, placing in the top third of Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 for 2012. For more information, please visit www.mmodal.com, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.