Along with two other Carnegie Mellon grad students, Juergen Fritsch founded MultiModal Technologies in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh in 2001. Three had grown to over 100 by 2011 when MultiModal merged with MedQuist to form M*Modal, which today counts 12,000 employees in five countries.
But M*Modal, the largest provider of medical transcription services in the U.S., hasn't abandoned its Pittsburgh roots. Fritsch, who serves M*Modal as chief scientist, reports that in the last 12 months, the company has made 50 hires – a 44% increase — bringing its Squirrel Hill workforce to 160, with more hiring possible.
The company is now headquartered in Tennessee, but the Pittsburgh office, says Fritsch, maintains “pretty much the same focus, developing software … for physicians and nurses to use in their daily operations.” Fritsch attributes the fast growth of the last two years to M*Modal's global reach, providing more resources to support expansion into new products and markets.
Right now, Pittsburgh is focused on two particular products. One is a further refinement of software that uses advanced natural language understanding and voice recognition technologies to turn dictation into written clinical documentation, “a major productivity driver,” says Fritsch, to speed compliance with complex new health records rules.
The other is a set of “tools to find information in a vast sea of documentation,” Fritsch says, concerning everything from individual patients to vast patient populations.
Source: Juergen Fritsch, M*Modal
Writer: Elise Vider