Transcend Announces Acquisition of Salar

Clinical documentation solutions company Transcend Services Inc recently announced its acquisition of Salar Inc, a privately held provider of electronic clinical documentation and billing workflow solutions for healthcare providers, in an $11 million cash for stock transaction that closed July 29, 2011. It is anticipated that the acquisition will give Transcend a stronger foothold in the hospital setting and provide its customers added functionality and flexibility.

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Baltimore, Salar’s solutions are used by leading academic and community hospitals. The company generated $4 million of revenue and $1.2 million of operating income in 2010 and is growing.

“This acquisition is key to both our growth and diversification strategies,” said Larry Gerdes, Transcend chairman and CEO. “From a growth perspective, the purchase is in line with our strategy of complementing our organic growth by completing selected strategic acquisitions, of which Salar is the sixth since the beginning of 2009. Salar, however, allows us to diversify because it’s the first of these companies to offer software products. Our purchase of Salar’s flexible and physician-centric products combined with the recent availability of our Encore medical transcription platform offered to hospitals under the software as a service model, will allow us further entry into the hospital setting.”

“As a leading provider of transcription services, we have been asked by many of our customer partners for assistance with the adoption of meaningful use of clinical data,” stated Susan McGrogan, president & COO of Transcend. “Partnering with our customers has always been vital to providing the highest level of service, and by incorporating Salar’s innovative technology; we will be better positioned to respond to our customers’ needs.”

Salar product solutions – which include Team Notes™, TeamRelay™, TeamQuery™, and TAP Charge Capture™ – provide a highly customizable and physician-friendly interface that integrates easily with existing EMR systems, allowing physicians and hospitals to achieve notable productivity, financial, and patient safety improvements. Hospitals can enhance their investment in existing healthcare information systems by overlaying Salar’s products to achieve high levels of physician adoption and return on investment utilizing a meaningful use stage 1 certified product.

“With Salar’s complementary technology, we will be able to move our own speech recognition technology into templates, allowing us to expand our customer base to include clinicians who prefer template-based clinical documentation solutions, and enabling our solutions to meet ‘meaningful use’ of EMRs,” said Ken Ravenelle, Transcend chief technology officer. “In 2012, we anticipate the ability to combine our respective technologies into a hybrid that will give our Encore customers added functionality and greater flexibility.”

Todd Johnson, Salar president and co-founder, added, "By incorporating Transcend's dictation, speech recognition, and document delivery technologies into Salar's tools, we will further help customers achieve broad physician adoption and maximize physician productivity. Healthcare systems and hospitals can now support the way their physicians work, while incorporating the most cost-effective solution. The technology that Salar and Transcend bring encompass clinical workflow processes electronically, which are very manual today. This enables us to better leverage the overall adoption of a true electronic record and limit the need for scanning records into the EMR. In fact, Salar’s TAP Charge Capture application completes billing charges at the point-of-care. TAP eliminates traditional, labor-intensive, and error prone billing processes by allowing physicians to complete charge entry online or automating billing from the physician’s documentation.”

Johnson went on to say that both Salar and Transcend are dedicated to providing an outstanding, responsive service experience for every customer. “I couldn’t ask for a more closely aligned partner than Transcend to fuel Salar’s growth and deliver increased value to Transcend’s customers.”

Salar will remain in its Baltimore location and operate as a business unit of Transcend.

Source: Transcend Services