RevSpring Keeps Customer Financials Running Smoothly with Solimar

The US medical industry continues to adapt to the digitization of medical records. As far back as 2009, the US government was keen to digitize the medical profession, passing the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical (HITECH) Act that offered subsidies to providers adopting electronic medical records (EMR) solutions. A decade later, the percentage of physicians using an EMR system is nearly 90%, according to the CDC.

The EMR platforms offer many components to facilitate provider and patient services. Many include document design and editing tools for communications like Explanations of Benefits (EOBs), bills, and statements. But many of the EMR systems were designed for electronic presentment, not necessarily files suitable for printing. The PDF files created by the EMR systems must often be transformed for printing, enhancing: spot color and RGB color spaces, low-resolution images, transparent objects and flattening issues, and missing fonts and font characters. Due to the scale of print production at RevSpring, some files made it a challenge to meet customer SLA’s when the digital front end (DFE) of the continuous-feed inkjet printer would struggle with the content. With such high volumes, finding and mitigating one challenging file can slow production significantly.

For RevSpring, finding a scalable solution to enhance PDF files composed and supplied by their clients was critical. “We need to meet our customer SLAs regardless of the input format, so PDF images can’t be an obstacle,” explains Hollingsworth. RevSpring’s in-house PDF-based order management and tracking solution, Maestro, already used Solimar Print Director Enterprise (SPDE) along with Rubika and SOLfusion to process and prepare customer files. As a result, ReadyPDF could quickly be added and implemented with the existing workflow infrastructure at RevSpring.

The traditional approach used standalone tools to preflight each problematic file, then make corrections. Those steps were time-consuming and led to inconsistencies based on the different profiles and corrections each designer applied. According to Sublett, “We started testing Solimar’s ReadyPDF to see if we can create a one-size-fits-all to tackle the common issues with the healthcare system PDFs.” Using ReadyPDF as a processing step within SPDE meant the file corrections could be standardized and automated as part of their thousands of existing workflows for the different lines of business.

The results from processing with ReadyPDF had an immediate impact. Errors in processing the customer supplied PDFs were significantly reduced, and failures at the printer’s DFE were virtually eliminated. According to Sublett, “With ReadyPDF, 90% of files that previously failed due to fonts, transparencies, or other common issues now process quickly and correctly.” In addition to correcting the files, ReadyPDF also optimized the output, so files that previously required five hours to spool were now ready in minutes.

While the server-based ReadyPDF solution processes most of the approximately 10 million files, the standalone tool has been useful to keep production moving in such a fast-paced environment. When new versions of customer-supplied PDFs arrive with missing fonts or other issues that stop production, RevSpring’s in-house design team uses the standalone version of ReadyPDF to fix issues on-the-fly. When new problems are found and resolved during production, the team performs a post-mortem follow-up with programmers a few days later to apply a permanent fix to that line of business using the server version of ReadyPDF.