Global Industries

Edifecs XEngine delivers unparalleled performance to validate transactions for syntax, semantics and custom business rules, thereby ensuring operational integrity of information exchange with trading partners. In addition, XEngine enables splitting, routing, aggregation, enrichment of transactions and translation between multiple standards. Edifecs XEngine’s enterprise-strength throughput capabilities enable fast and accurate validation of transactions at the edge-of-the-enterprise and its translation capabilities allow data conversion between industry-standard formats and downstream system formats.

In this time of increasing financial, operational and regulatory pressures on businesses and their trading partners, executives are discovering that electronic transactions present as many challenges as they do opportunities. Companies implement electronic transaction strategies in order to achieve the highest possible levels of automation, however, as almost everyone has discovered, many backend processes and systems have very specific data content and format requirements making the exchange of data difficult.

Standards such as X12, EDIFACT and even proprietary file formats must be supported, given the wide variety of trading partner requirements. All these requirements have created a number of questions that organization leadership should address to be responsive to their markets. The answers to these questions can determine whether an organization can create and maintain a strategic advantage leveraging electronic trading relationships.

• What tools can I use to ensure that the data is compliant with my business specific requirements, and those of my trading partners?
• Do I need different software systems for different standards such as X12, EDIFACT, and legacy file formats?
• How will I manage, enforce, or relax edits and errors, based upon the different needs of my trading partners?
• Different types of submitters need to send different types of data in the transactions. How will I manage to ensure that I receive this data when I need it?
• How can I split and route transactions once they hit my firewall — to the right adjudication system, to a carve-out vendor, or even to separate good transactions from bad transactions?
• How will I generate the appropriate acknowledgments and error messages when bad transactions are received?
• How will I keep up with the standards and code sets as they change and evolve and with new standards as they are implemented?
• How can I serve up this EDI data for new value-added applications in my organization without a huge amount of translator maintenance and cost?

Edifecs, the leading provider of B2B solutions for transaction based interoperability, addresses all of these questions with Edifecs XEngine, our market-leading production validation technology. Edifecs XEngine ensures interoperability with trading partners by validating healthcare and global industries transactions for syntax, semantics and trading partner-specific business rules.

With real-time edits and filters on the data entering or leaving your enterprise, you are assured that your backend applications and data warehouses, as well as those of your trading partners, contain accurate and valid transaction data, and achieve maximum transaction automation. By moving your specific requirements in front of those backend systems, you can proactively catch and manage exceptions.

With Edifecs XEngine you can:

• Validate that data against your Companion Guide specific edits, by trading partner or service type, before it is passed through to hit your backend systems
• Relax edits for specific trading partners, to create warnings, informational responses, or simply ignore the edit
• Split and re-batch transactions in real-time: good from bad, or based on content
• Receive automated error reports in human readable and XML formats to share internally or with trading partners
• Keep abreast of the latest transaction versions, as well as over 60 code set updates through monthly executable updates, and stay up-to-date with ICD-9, CPT-4, NDC and SNFR-HIPPS codes
• Automatically create acknowledgement messages such as 997, TA1, 997 and 824 transactions
• Automatically transform EDI data into XML, for consumption by other systems or processes in your organization

To ensure ongoing operational data integrity, you need go beyond pre-production and 3rd party testing. Organizations need to include a validation engine as part of their in-stream production data flow. While pre-production and 3rd party testing are a good first step in the process to ensure that you and your trading partner can exchange files, they do not guarantee that all files coming into your production system will meet your business requirements.

The benefit of an in-line validation engine is that it will check every data file. By catching errors as early in the process as possibly, your organization will save time and money associated with dealing with poor or corrupt data ending up in your back-end system. Additionally, your trading partners will be notified immediately as to the cause and location of the errors in their original data file, so that they can quickly fix the problem and resubmit the data.

Edifecs XEngine can also validate data before it leaves your organization, so you can verify that the data will meet your trading partners’ business requirements. Errors can be separated from valid transactions before leaving the organization, ensuring that your trading partner will not reject an entire batch of data because of few errors.

In addition to data integrity and transaction compliance checking, Edifecs XEngine can also screen and filter out the bad data from the good data. The filtering can be done at various levels based on your business needs — by transaction or at logical business unit level. By processing as much good data as possible, resubmission costs will be reduced significantly because only the bad data needs to be re-submitted. This capability saves you time and money no matter which side of the transaction your business is on.

In addition to filtering good data from bad, Edifecs XEngine can also be used as an application data router. Because it is part of the front-end process doing validation, Edifecs XEngine can look at the data content and use information such as file type, transaction type, trading partner, purpose, or even member or provider ID, to route the data to appropriate downstream applications.

This functionality has many uses in any healthcare enterprise:

• It can be used to route data to different back-end systems
• It can be used to distinguish between real-time and batch transactions and route the data to the appropriate servers to provide proper load balancing and meet required response times
• It can be used to prioritize transaction processing

In addition to compliance checking and message filtering, Edifecs XEngine also provides the ability to convert data from its native format such as X12, EDIFACT and IDOC to an equivalent XML format. Some of the key benefits of being able to get the data in XML format include:

• No need to write code or develop applications to understand the various native formats. Edifecs XEngine provides the pre-built parsers for these formats out of the box.
• No need to keep up to date with ongoing standards changes such as new releases of code sets, v5010, NPI.
• Leverage free, open source third party tools such as Xerces and other XML parsers to read the entire document, or use XPath to extract just some key values from the document.
• Leverage additional new technologies that have been developed for XML and now apply them to other file formats. For example, use style sheets (XSLTs) to present the converted native data to your users in a friendly and easy to use manner.