AthletiCo's Paper-Heavy Billing Department Gets into Shape

pattern or morphology.

The solution provider knew the technology would allow the company to classify semi-structured documents at the same accuracy rates ordinarily achieved on structured forms. The solution can also be applied to an unlimited number of generalized tasks. For example, automating the processing of bills and invoices, documents encountered by virtually any business, typically creates a reduction of at least 60% in the overall cost of operations, no matter what volume of documents involved. DocWorks was sure the solution could handle the influx of EOBs that AthletiCo receives.

“AthletiCo has to get that paper document into the system so they can match it with the patient’s paperwork,” said LaSpisa. “Our goal was to keep their current structure, yet improve their efficiency. They wanted to roll out something everyone could use to be productive right away.”

The solution would allow DocWorks to help Athletico transform its business process for handling incoming EOB documents. The underlying ABBYY technology allows them to create a generic description of variable forms such as an EOB. The software specifies ranges for data location and content in terms of regular expressions, substrings or sets of variants like line items and subtotals. It also can define relations to other objects, such as corporate logos, that may exist on the page.

Today, AthletiCo scans all EOBs into the DocWorks system. Once an EOB has been entered, the JAVA-based DocWorks solution pulls up all the payments for the related documents and automatically creates a deposit slip, LaSpisa said.

“It killed three birds with one stone. We were cutting the time it took for someone to scan EOBs and for someone separately doing deposit slips, and [we are] organizing the information into a searchable format,” Tsatsis said.

The amount of time employees saved by not having to search for the documents they needed was huge, totaling the equivalent of several employees focused full-time on the process.

In fact, given the increasing amount of business AthletiCo’s 831-member professional rehabilitation staff provides, the company would have soon needed to hire at least one more staff member to join the input and paper-search team—a move that would have cost the company at least $25,000 in salary plus additional employee benefits, Tsatsis said. The clerk who had previously been dedicated to pulling up information has been reassigned to other administrative functions, he added.

The less tangible benefit of being able to find and process payments more quickly is even more valuable, he added. “Locating a paper document could take three or four weeks in the past. In our old document-retention system, it would take hours. Now, we’re talking seconds!” said Tsatsis. “If we can’t retrieve the information, we can’t get paid. You can’t put a value on not being able to locate the information for up to a month.”

The Extra Mile

AthletiCo was so satisfied with the initial system that it decided to expand its paperless endeavors. DocWorks used ABBYY’s forms processing software to help capture their e-forms for 401K, human resources and other business documents, which AthletiCo distributes via internet submission or fax to its 32 Chicago-area offices.

Once again, the solution saved huge amounts of money and time: “The electronic process eliminated postage, copying, mailing and courier costs, and the time associated with physically moving documents from site to site,” said Tsatsis. “And this approach means a department can automatically route a form to the correct individual or department for approval,” he added.

Thanks to DocWorks, and ABBYY’s technology, AthletiCo’s internal administrative and billing work is fighting fit and ready for action.

Elements Detected by ABBYY FlexiCapture Technology

• Static text—Any text on the page. Static text is defined by the possible
  contents of the text and users may choose to specify specific variants of text to be found.
• Separators—Horizontal or vertical black lines. Many documents contain
  multiple separators so it is important to define the desired separator
  specifically enough (such as by its relationship to other objects, or by
  creating general constraints on the separator’s length) to allow the system to distinguish one specific separator from others.
• White gaps—Horizontal or vertical areas that contain no objects. White gaps, which are readily and reliably detected very quickly, are very helpful for distinguishing between several specific layouts.
• Barcode—Any one- or two-dimensional barcode. ABBYY FlexiCapture detects barcode types supported by ABBYY FineReader Engine.
• Character chains—Text that varies and may contain several lines, and
  therefore cannot be reliably detected by the static text element. The best way to ensure recognition of this element is to specify a regular expression for the contents of a character chain, as well as a set of characters that can be found in it.
• Tables—These are multi-column, multi-row elements, such as detail lines in invoices and purchase orders. A single table may run across several pages. Simplify the description of tables by describing only the non-repeated parts of the table (i.e. header, footer, columns) and detect all rows automatically.
  Another option is to specify non-fixed order of columns, multi-lined rows and key words for footers.
• Object collection—Any object, such as text, a punctuation mark, picture or checkbox. This element can be useful for locating very generic contents on a certain area of the page.
• Date, currency, phone number—These text elements can be identified through several pre-defined options and format definitions.

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ABBYY USA is a world leader in document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies. Product offerings include FineReader Engine, a comprehensive recognition SDK that combines full page/zonal recognition, PDF conversion and data capture; FlexiCapture, data capture technology for semi-structured forms/documents; and Recognition Server, a server-based OCR and PDF conversion solution. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include Anoto (C-Technologies), Cardiff, Banctec, BenQ, DICOM/Kofax. EMC, EPSON, Freedom Scientific, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Kurzweil, Microtek, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Stellent, Panasonic, ReadSoft, Samsung Electronics, Saperion, Siemens Nixdorf, Sumitomo Electric Systems and Toshiba. ABBYY is headquartered in Moscow, with offices in the United States, the UK, Ukraine, Japan and Germany. For more information: www.abbyy.com.