This government department works with 1,255 medical institutions country-wide to serve 9 million military veterans every year. It has dedicated Veteran Integrated Service Networks (VISNs) that contracts selected hospitals and outpatient clinics to meet veterans’ medical needs in the covered states.

One of the VISNs employs a medication wholesaler and Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) that provide pharmaceutical products to affiliated hospitals and outpatient clinics to fulfill veterans’ medical needs. Both entities send invoices in PDF and spreadsheet formats, generally range between 1,000 to 5,000 lines, to bill the government for their products and services. However, the users had to manually extract the invoice data and put it into a format that SQL Server could read and import into its database for querying and reporting.  The VISN sought a solution that can parse the incoming invoices, extract and validate the data, and convert them into a SQL Server compatible format.

Astera ReportMiner allows the VISN to build report models and extraction templates that can automatically process countless invoices, storing them in Excel format. The processed files are then called into the SQL Server database as part of the daily update job. With Astera ReportMiner’s automation capabilities, the process has now become as easy as copy-pasting the invoice PDFs into the source folder and receiving the extracted data in an Excel file after half a minute.