EDDS Vault

National Finance Service/Collection Agency

EDDS Vault Technology Provides 11:1 Return On Labor

• Company: A national financial service/collection agency providing health insurance collection services for the Department of Defense (DOD).
• Challenge: Within three weeks, find and deploy a solution to locating a few thousand documents with specific codes among more than 100,000 documents.
• Results: DOCCENTER's agility enabled deployment of the technology within one week. The application accurately pinpointed the needed documents.
• Impact: The solution provided an 11:1 return on labor. The agency estimated that the labor cost to manually locate the documents would have been approximately $86,000. Instead, the cost of the EDDS Vault form recognition software was only $7,575.

Signature Performance, a national financial service/collection agency, had only three weeks to find and deploy a solution to an issue representing potentially thousands of dollars in lost revenue. The agency, which provides health insurance collection services for the Department of Defense (DOD), turned to DOCCENTER for help, resulting in a 11:1 return on labor.

Some of the thousands of explanation of benefits statements (EOBs) the agency processes weekly contained a specific insurance code for denied claims that could be resubmitted within 60 days. If these EOBs were located and resubmitted in time, the DOD could be paid for claims accepted on resubmission, totaling potentially thousands of dollars.

But the agency was faced with finding that specific code among multiple other codes on over 100,000 scanned EOBs in a short timeframe. The agency considered hiring additional staff, but those costs would have dramatically offset any financial benefit to the agency.

DOCCENTER was already providing the agency with a Web-based repository customized with a workflow that moves documents through the stages of claim processing. When the agency asked for help with this problem, DOCCENTER determined that its technology could be used to electronically recognize the specific code so those EOBs could be separated. This was handled with components of DOCCENTER's EDDS Vault product suite.

Part of the process was to make the denial code text "readable" by a computer. The EOBS to be searched had been scanned and saved as image files which cannot be "read" by a computer until they have been processed with Optical Recognition Technology (OCR) technology. Using the OCR engine of the EDDS Vault scanning application handled that part of the problem.

Another part of the process was to create a template with the EDDS Vault Form Designer for the EOBs to be processed. This template enables you to tell the system where important information is located on a standard form. Then, as a batch of these forms are processed, the information in specified fields is captured with OCR and saved in an organized manner, such as in a table or in database format. Since the EOBs were in a standard format and the denial code always appeared in the same location, DOCCENTER was able to help the agency use the Form Designer to capture all codes on all EOBs that appeared in that location. Once all the codes appearing in that location were captured, a program was written to separate the EOBS with that specific denial code into a queue for processing.

DOCCENTER's agility enabled deployment of the solution within three weeks. The application processed over 100,000 documents to find the several thousand claims that could be resubmitted. Instead of a labor cost of $86,000 for a manual process, the cost of the EDDS Vault form recognition software cost was only $7,575.

"DOCCENTER has allowed us to streamline our business processes… The flexibility of EDDS Vault let us add custom workflows and logic to automate labor-intensive tasks."

- Michael Anthofer, IT Manager