PR - Attachmate Helps Medical Collection Agency Speed Reimbursement Processing

Attachmate Corporation today announced that Medical Reimbursements of America (MRA) is using Verastream Host Integrator software for easier and faster access to its customers’ patient account systems. As a result, MRA, a healthcare receivables company, has reduced the amount of time required to gather mission-critical accounts receivable information from days to hours and realized increased agent productivity, allowing the company to grow its business without additional employee costs.

MRA relies on patient account, insurance and payment information to help more than 220 client hospitals locate and recover maximum insurance reimbursements on patient accounts arising from various accident injuries. Because MRA handles only a specialized portion of patient accounts for any given hospital, after an account’s initial placement, the company typically only has access to hospitals’ patient account (PA) databases via a time-consuming manual process.

Tasked with reducing the number of hours spent manually tracking account transactional activity, MRA’s programming team developed a framework for automating and scheduling this information gathering process, but needed a solution to integrate its accounts receivable process with the information held on client hospitals’ PA systems. After other solutions failed to offer enterprise functionality, MRA turned to Attachmate Verastream to service-enable critical information locked up in disparate client systems so it could fully automate the accounts receivable process by combining the Verastream-generated services.

“Our billing agents were manually reviewing each individual account in a hospital’s system to determine any new transactional activity. With our client hospitals holding anywhere from 185 to 1,600 individual patient records, some of our agents were spending as long as two-and-a-half days reviewing a single hospital’s accounts,” said Price Barnes, business analyst for Medical Reimbursements of America. “Leveraging Attachmate Verastream, that same data collection process now takes only 10 minutes, making our agents more productive and allowing us to add new clients without increasing our internal headcount.”

Attachmate Verastream Host Integrator encapsulates data and logic via the screen interface and exposes legacy business processes as Web services, Java and .NET components that can be mixed, matched and reused to build new composite applications with a new look and feel. No changes to valuable mainframe application code or associated business processes are required.

“Medical Reimbursements of America is dedicated to delivering fast, accurate information to its customers,” said Eric Varness, vice president of marketing for Attachmate. “Because MRA needed to access many disparate systems at its client sites, Verastream software’s ability to easily integrate the company’s automation and scheduling processes allowed them to realize significant time and cost savings.”