Re: PC Based EDI

Working in the health care field (I write billing software for doctors'
offices), I'm a newcomer to EDI (though I've been electronically
interchanging data for a long time). The adoption of the 837 and 835
standards by HCFA (i.e., Medicare) is the occasion. Yesterday I attended
a seminar given by one of the Medicare intermediaries, and got a 20-minute
intro to the 837 standard, which it looks like I'm going to have to
support.


One question that occurs to me is this: It looks like a well-defined
syntax, for which somewhere there ought to be railroad diagrams or BNF
grammars (though if there are, they were studiously avoided by the
Medicare documentation). Low-level data types are combined in structures
in a way that's much like a programming language. So the question is:
what techniques has experience shown to be best for writing programs that
will read and write these structures? And are there software
tools--perhaps in the form of function libraries--that help to compose or
decompose these structures? And are there, for instance, testing tools
that disclose conformity or not, at least at the syntactic level?


Can anyone help me get oriented?


Joe Landau, Applied Software Technology, Campbell, CA. jrl@landau.win.net
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.