Case Study: VISN 9 reduces invoice extraction time from hours to under a minute with Astera Software's ReportMiner

Cuts Down Invoice Data Extraction Time from Hours to Less than a Minute

This government healthcare department — the largest integrated network in the U.S., contracting 1,255 medical institutions to serve 9 million veterans — struggled to turn wholesaler and PBM invoice PDFs and spreadsheets into usable data. SSIS could not read the file formats, so pharmacoeconomists manually extracted and aggregated more than 1,000 daily transactions, a process that often took 30 minutes to several hours per invoice and limited timely budgeting and utilization analysis.

The VISN implemented Astera ReportMiner to build reusable extraction templates that automatically parse incoming invoices, export Excel files, and feed SSIS/SQL Server for reporting. Processing time dropped from hours to under a minute per invoice, the workflow now runs unattended, and analysts gain timely, granular insights into medication usage and costs that support better budgeting and cost‑saving decisions.

VISN 9

VISN 9

Pharmacoeconomist