SwedishAmerican Health System, a major healthcare provider with headquarters in Rockford, Illinois, has signed a contract with MedQuist Inc. to provide transcription outsourcing and speech recognition editing services to the system's hospital and medical centre.

SwedishAmerican projects annual savings of approximately $500,000 as a result of the move to outsourcing and speech recognition, while improving productivity through the replacement of old technology.

Phil Wasson, Vice President and CIO of SwedishAmerican commented: "To meet our increasingly complex medical documentation needs, we determined that a vendor with the scale, scope, and experience of MedQuist was best."