L&H Acquires 60 Percent of Rodeer Systems

L&H announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire certain Rodeer Systems Inc's medical transcription assets, including Rodeer's operations in Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas. The agreement calls for L&H to acquire the assets for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $25 million, a figure that is approximately one and one half of Rodeer's annual revenues from these operations. The acquisition, which constitutes approximately 60% of all assets of Rodeer, is expected to bolster L&H transcription resources and help enhance its growing healthcare solutions business.

In November 1999, L&H purchased Rodeer Systems Inc's southern-Florida based medical transcription business, and most recently L&H also finalized its acquisition of Dictaphone Corporation of Stratford, Conn. The two acquisitions complement each other - Rodeer's transcription systems run on Dictaphone's voice and text platforms - and provide L&H with further resources to provide an end-to-end solution for the creation, management and analysis of medical documentation. The Cosmas System, a software solution that L&H would also acquire from Rodeer, is expected to give L&H additional document management, transcription data analysis and management, and backoffice function capabilities.

"Now that we have completed the Dictaphone acquisition, L&H plans on integrating its speech and language technology into the Dictaphone platforms, ideally positioning us to offer the healthcare industry an end to end solution that we believe can substantially reduce the cost for transcription and patient record management," said Gaston Bastiaens, president and CEO of L&H. "The additional transcription services capacity (and the Cosmas system) that we would acquire from Rodeer, would also enhance our base from which to develop a complete solution for back office and post editing."

"Our industry is in a state of evolution. Ever-increasing demand for medical information, a shortage of qualified medical transcriptionists, and emerging technologies such as the Internet and automatic speech recognition have created the most exciting time for this industry in recent memory," said Sean Carroll, president and CEO of Rodeer Systems. "L&H has been a leader in the move to create advanced, automated solutions for medical transcription and dictation and is by far the best company to help Rodeer, its employees and its customers take advantage of the opportunities that lay ahead."

L&H Healthcare Solutions Strategy

L&H has been actively implementing, over the past year, a strategy aimed at creating a suite of healthcare solutions designed to reduce the tremendous cost and time involved in the clinical documentation process. The company expects to develop healthcare industry offerings and services that include an end-to-end document creation, management and analysis solution, available via an application service provider (ASP) model. It also expects to offer an Internet-based dictation and transcription service that allows clinicians to capture dictation without changing the way they currently work.

L&H expects to employ its coding, data mining and clinical language understanding technologies to convert this valuable data into a variety of beneficial reports. These reports might include financial coding/abstracting reports, utilization reviews, decision support, outcomes analysis, etc. The reports and underlying data captured by the L&H systems would be quickly and easily accessible to clinicians anytime, anywhere, via a Web-based workflow management and communications system.

L&H has obtained the resources to implement this healthcare solutions strategy by combining its own existing healthcare industry expertise and technologies with that of other carefully chosen medical market vendors such as Rodeer, LTI, OmniMed, Articulate Systems and Dictaphone Systems.

About Rodeer Systems

Rodeer Systems is a provider of medical transcription services to hospitals, integrated health care facility networks, outpatient clinics, physician practices, and other health care providers in the United States. Rodeer currently owns and operates 19 offices in 8 states, employs over 700 medical linguistics specialists (transcriptionists), and provides transcription services to over 400 customers located in 26 states. Rodeer has also developed a proprietary intranet technology platform, which facilitates the electronic storage and analysis of both unstructured, text-based and structured electronic information derived from transcribed documents within a health care facility.

About Lernout & Hauspie

Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) is a global leader in advanced speech and language solutions for vertical markets, computers, automobiles, telecommunications, embedded products, consumer goods and the Internet. The company is making the speech user interface (SUI) the keystone of simple, convenient interaction between humans and technology, and is using advanced translation technology to break down language barriers.

The company provides a wide range of offerings, including: customized solutions for corporations; core speech technologies marketed to OEMs; end user and retail applications for continuous speech products in horizontal and vertical markets; and document creation, human and machine translation services, Internet translation offerings, and linguistic tools. L&H's products and services originate in four basic areas: automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), digital speech and music compression (SMC) and text-to-text (translation). For more information, please visit Lernout & Hauspie on the World Wide Web at www.lhs.com or www.lhsl.com.

Contact Audrey Webb, Lernout & Hauspie, +1 781 203 5341 awebb@lhsl.com