I work for a PPO Network, and we have a trading partner who wishes to use the 837(Institutional and Professional) for bill repricing.  I've looked over the standard in detail from Washington Press, and I started working on a parser, but there has to be an easier(quick) way to get this done.  I know there exists several packages to handle these types of transactions, but I've no clue where to really start.  A google search comes up with several vendors.  We must take a bill in 837 form and reprice it and return the proper documents(837?).  Transport will be FTP with PGP encryption. Any suggestions/help are greatly appreciated, especially from those who've dealt with the 837 documents.  

josh

I can only suggest IBM WebSphere DataStage TX + EDI pack.
If you get the Extended Edition, you will be able to automate this, and the Commerce Manager product is a complete EDI in and out solution. All you need to write is the interface maps to your back end programs.

JuJutsu - Jeff S.
Support Analyst

Try Trading Partner PC from Emanio (www.emanio.com).  It works well and is priced fairly.  Trading Partner PC can process several thousand transactions per hour, which meets the needs of most businesses.  There is generally little need for midrange or large system EDI Translators anymore, unless the company is huge.  Even then, by the careful use of multiple mailboxes, a Trading Partner PC solution (including computer) will be under 5K, while a midrange solution will be much more.  Simply get several PC solutions is how some very large companies work.

As far as a mapping(parsing) tool, DataStage is the best thing on the market.  Very powerful (but a long learning curve).  However, pretty expensive.  Even more powerful (but not EDI specific), with less of a learning curve, is PERL.  Perl is open source, and free.  It runs well on just about everything.  Go to Monster.com and enter DataStage.  You might find a few listings.  Enter Perl and you will get thousands of hits.  

The big reason to use Perl over DataStage (besides the price) is that there are thousands of folks that know Perl.  I suspect that the number of DataStage guru's is numbered in the hundreds.

Richard Hug
New Tampa Consulting

Since you are a PPO, you will need HIPAA support. Doing this in Perl will cost more than DataStage TX. You would not belive the man hours it took just to develop the type trees. Latest version will be 8.0 with HIPAA IP 4.1, due out soon. Learning curve to basic use is not that long,l to become an expert across all areas possible, that takes time. If you read and go through the tutorial and implementation guide and take the basic couse, you will be able to do most of what you need. If you require mapping assistance, there are many consulting companies, and IBM now has a lower cost virtual consulting group for mapping projects. Much less than an on site consulting job. Their support group has one of the best reputations in business.

JuJutsu - Jeff S.
Support Analyst