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MedQuist, a provider of integrated clinical documentation solutions for healthcare, has announced its acquisition of Pittsburgh-based speech recognition technology developer M*Modal for $130 million.M*Modal's cloud-based software helps providers easily convert speech into structured clinical information. This improves physician efficiency, enhances the integration of the physician narrative into electronic health records (EHR), and contributes to the analysis of clinical information for quality and reimbursement requirements.

Time spent in front of a computer is time spent away from a patient. And in a small physician practice, that time is pretty valuable.

As more doctors begin using their personal mobile devices to aid patient care, hospitals must be prepared to manage them in order to ensure security and privacy, according to one expert. It is imperative that the hospital manage not just the medical devices it issues, but also personal devices, like the iPad or iPhone, that the clinician may have brought from home, said Ilene Yarnoff, lead assurance and resilience principal for Booz Allen's Healthcare clients.

Twitter can be used to track important health trends, according to computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University. Mark Dredze and Michael J. Paul fed two billion public tweets posted between May 2009 and October 2010 into computers, then used software to filter out the 1.5 million messages that referred to health matters. Dredze, a researcher at the university's Human Language Technology Center of Excellence and an assistant research professor of computer science, and Paul, a doctoral student, said identities of the tweeters were not collected.