OBOE software dramatically shortens time required to analyze HIPAA data.

When President Clinton signed the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) into law in 1996, little did the industry realize the complexity that would be involved in getting the new data files translated and normalized into understandable and useful reports. CashRetriever Systems, Inc. (CSI) began to undertake the process in 2003 with the introduction of a denial management application to help hospitals track the denial rates in remittances received from insurance companies.

Then in June of 2004, CSI started using a software product from American Coders called Open Business Objects for EDI--OBOE. It simplified the translation process and increased the speed with which CSI's programmers were able to import the data from the HIPAA 835, 837, 276 and 277 into a database. It has saved hundreds of man-hours in programming time by converting the EDI documents received into XML format. Then using the XML protocol, CSI normalizes the data with its TCS product offering.

CSI's programming staff has this to say: "American Coders' OBOE with HIPAA package has saved us hours of programming time that we would have otherwise needed to write our own conversion software. The Java objects provided with this package are easily called directly from our code and allow us to painlessly translate complex HIPAA documents into user-friendly XML in minutes. Using the OBOE software also substantially reduces the amount of work we have to do to accommodate annual HIPAA updates; we simply plug in the latest version of OBOE and we're up to date."

At the time of installation, the cost of the OBOE software was a very small investment for the savings achieved in programmer time at CSI. And for experienced Java programmers the learning curve was comparable to other standard libraries.