News

Vitria inserts ILOG rules engine into EAI line

• By Rich Seeley
• July 30, 2003

Executives at Vitria Technology Inc. (www.vitria.com) listened when analysts predicting that integration brokers without rules engines will be left behind by the end of 2004, said Richard Kernahan, director of product management for Vitria Healthcare Solutions. So this month the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based business process integration vendor announced it is embedding ILOG JRules into its products.

Initially, the business rules technology from Mountain View, Calif.-based ILOG Inc. (www.ilog.com) will be packaged with Vitria software for claims processing in health care, Kernahan told eADT. In the future, the Vitria/ILOG combination will show up in software for other industries’ applications such as supply chain management, he added.

The need for rules technology for health care is acute as claims processing becomes both more automated and more complex, he said.

As an example, Kernahan said, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma came to Vitria seeking help with a back-end claims system that was not able to handle claims with problems.

“The back-end claims systems did not have sufficient logic to resolve all of the problems,” he said. “So a lot of those claims were falling out to manual workflow. They were getting printed out on a mainframe report. That report was written up and given to various people who worked through it manually, line-by-line to resolve the problems. What they were asking us to do was automate that process to eliminate a lot of that manual effort.”

By adding ILOG JRules to the Vitria implementation, developers were able to build a solution in 90 days that applies business rules to problems claims processing and thus reduces manual work, Kernahan explained.

The two companies will now jointly market their products and share technology, according to Henry Bowers, ILOG product manager, business rules.