AthletiCo's Paper-Heavy Billing Department Gets into Shape

Client: Chicago-based AthletiCo
Number of offices: 32
Service: Provider of outpatient, orthopedic rehabilitation services
Business problem: Paper-intensive manual system to track Explanation of Benefits paperwork and insurance payment checks was time-consuming and error-prone
Solution: DocWorks
Enabling technologies:
ABBYY FlexiCapture™;
ABBYY FineReader® Engine SDK
Results: Prevented necessity of hiring an additional person at a salary of at least $25,000 per year; cut search time from hours to mere seconds

AthletiCo’s billing department, which was manually working with deposits and paper and using an inefficient document-retrieval system, needed some serious therapy.

The company, a well-known Chicago-area provider of outpatient orthopedic rehabilitation services, was using a manually intensive series of procedures to track thousands of pages of patients’ explanation of benefits (EOBs) and insurance company payment checks. Having received an EOB, an AthletiCo employee would detach the check and write the check number, amount and other data on the EOB form, complete a deposit slip and scan the EOB, and then store this data on the server.

“An EOB can be up to 1,500 pages,” said Nick Tsatsis, chief executive officer and chief financial officer of AthletiCo. “If a question arose, locating the scanned version was a nightmare that could take hours in our document-retrieval system and days if people had to wade through the actual paper documents, since forms were saved as batches based on the date of receipt, and we could not search for a specific name or case number,” he said.

“In the past, we would have to scan the EOB, but we’d never scan the check because of the process and how the business flowed. We’d hand-write the check number directly on the EOB,” said Tsatsis. “Even harder, insurance companies often submitted a single check for multiple EOBs, as many as 300,” he added.

Road to Recovery

Thankfully, a business card he’d picked up three years ago had been burning a hole in Tsatsis’ Rolodex. While at an accounting trade show, the AthletiCo executive had seen a booth and presentation by DocWorks of Schaumburg, IL.

“For some reason, I took their card and held onto it,” recalled Tsatsis.

DocWorks, which specializes in transforming companies’ paper-filled environments into a world of easily searchable, cost-effective electronic documentation, offers both hosted services and in-house systems. When Tsatsis and AthletiCo president and founder Mark Kaufman contacted the service bureau and VAR, Sam LaSpisa, DocWorks president, immediately realized DocWorks could resolve the rehabilitation organization’s paper chaos with a course of “OCR therapy”—and a solid back-end application that can connect captured information to the business process.

“Today, employees can retrieve information in seconds while on the phone with a client or insurance company,” said Mark Kaufman, AthletiCo president. “Having this information at our fingertips has really improved our productivity and customer service.”

DocWorks prescribed a solution that included ABBYY software products. Said LaSpisa, “One of our main reasons for using ABBYY’s software is our ability to create OCR (layouts) much more quickly and much more inexpensively than in the past. We’ve been able to open more market opportunities; we’re now able to offer our service to small as well as larger companies, without requiring a large initial upfront investment.”

Rehabilitating the System

Having determined that AthletiCo preferred an in-house solution to DocWorks’ hosted services offering, DocWorks recommended a system front-ended by ABBYY FlexiCapture Technology and ABBYY FineReader Engine.

FlexiCapture is an enabling technology that can classify and recognize unstructured documents at the same accuracy rates with which structured forms are processed. FlexiCapture uses a set of unique and proprietary algorithms to detect data elements on forms. Unlike other technologies that analyze form elements one by one, the solution can simultaneously view all the elements on a form as one unified