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Healthcare EDI Integration
Introduction
Two different methods of EDI are required for manufacturers of medical products and providers, such as hospitals and clinics. While the underlying concepts are similar, the EDI documents are different.
- Manufacturers use EDI for the product order-to-payment cycle. These are the familiar INbound Purchase Order, OUTbound Shipment Notice, and OUTbound Invoice; plus other documents such as Chargebacks.
- Providers use EDI for eligibility, claims, and appeals with payers such as Blue Cross. Their EDI activity is stipulated by HIPAA.
Providers
For more information relating to providers, please see our HIPAA discussion.
Healthcare Manufacturers
Your business is unique because the very highest quality medical product standards must be met. These high standards apply to business processes and are subject to regulation and scrutiny. Yet, customers’ requirements affect your processes. This means you must adapt your time tested processes while ensuring the cost of each process is minimized. Practically, this means process automation, so that the limited customer service staff has ample time to focus upon problems. For example, if you drop-ship to hospitals or clinics, the correct addresses (to the correct station) must be easily importable and tied to the correct bill-to distributor.
Improved process automation can be achieved by fine-tuning your existing EDI and ERP systems, especially the swift alerting of exception messages. Other unique challenges are:
- Lot tracing – sending the lot number to customers on the invoice.
- Expiration management – receiving accurate inventory reports.
- Contract administration with non-profit buying groups and government agencies.
Conclusion
DCS' many years experience in EDI ensures your conversion will occur smoothly. The components (EDI system, ERP module, AS2 utility, and distributor requirements) can be orchestrated more harmoniously with expertise at hand. DCS' implementation, planning and development experience with EDI and ERP systems means our support and training is thorough, quick, and economical.
Since you need to be self-reliant and cost conscious, doing EDI with an expert that wants to help you improve your skills makes sense. Our DCS Process™ ensures your improvements will be done thoroughly and quickly. The next step is easy, email DCS for your Free Assessment.
For more in depth information:
Another effective use of EDI is to automate Accounts Payables.
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