DataDirect announced Benefitfocus is using DataDirect XML Converters to automatically transform thousands of X12 compliant EDI documents from insurance carriers to XML for accelerated processing.

Benefitfocus products streamline workforce operations for 89,000 employer groups and 150 insurance carriers worldwide. As a provider of healthcare benefits technology, Benefitfocus is committed to providing the best software and services to the healthcare insurance industry and to transfer and exchange the largest amount of electronic health data in the industry. A typical insurance carrier, and Benefitfocus client, has millions of members and thousands of groups. It is common for a carrier to have between 1,500 and 3,000 large groups and upward of 36,000 to 80,000 small groups.

Benefitfocus’ continued success in the marketplace has accelerated the data exchange between clients and the Benefitfocus XML-based data infrastructure. The system receives X12 EDI data from smaller groups as Benefit Enrollment and Maintenance Set (834). These 834-compliant EDI documents must be transformed and mapped to XML for processing, then reversed back to X12 EDI for outgoing documents. Importing membership data to support the groups proved extremely complex, difficult and required considerable development time and expense.

“To avoid the enormous amount of man hours needed to map the high-volume and often disparate 834 documents received from carriers, we opted to go with a third-party product versus in-house development and ongoing maintenance,” said Don Taylor, chief technology officer at Benefitfocus. “After a rigorous search, test and evaluation process we selected the DataDirect XML Converters from DataDirect Technologies based on its proven ability to handle high-volume transactions, superior scalability and out-of-the-box 834 EDI to XML conversion.”

DataDirect XML Converters provide bi-directional, highly-scalable software that streams EDI, flat files or other legacy data formats as XML and back, making data accessible to any application in the enterprise. The high-performance Java and .NET components support past and current X12 and HL7 EDI standards and provide a highly scalable streaming architecture to exceed the most demanding enterprise system requirements.

“By leveraging the DataDirect XML Converters, Benefitfocus has created a highly scalable, high-performance infrastructure which streamlines vital information among its key constituents – carriers, brokers, employer groups and consumers,” said Dr. Carlo Innocenti, senior XML program manager at DataDirect Technologies. “Benefitfocus estimates 40 hours of development time saved for each mapping using the XML Converters. These valuable IT resources can now be redeployed to revenue-generating activity and meeting the needs of a rapidly expanding customer base.”