Case Study: Emdeon Business Services achieves rapid, cost‑effective 24/7 Medicaid eligibility verification with Digium's Asterisk

Asterisk Implemented for Maryland’s Medicaid Management Information System

Emdeon Business Services, a leader in healthcare electronic data interchange and revenue cycle management, needed a federally mandated, 24/7 IVR system so providers could quickly verify Medicaid eligibility as part of Maryland’s MMIS. Bidding on the state contract required a modern, cost-effective solution with rapid time-to-market; after comparing vendors, Emdeon selected Asterisk Business Edition paired with Cepstral Swift for TTS because of its openness, flexibility, and low cost.

Emdeon implemented Asterisk as the telephony backbone—handling call routing, prompts, database queries (via a custom ODBC module), and TTS responses—running on Dell servers with Digium telephony cards and distributed between Baltimore and Nashville. The solution was deployed before the legacy system was retired, proved scalable by adding T1 capacity instead of new IVR servers, reduced setup and operating costs, improved provider access and state services, and has led Emdeon to expand Asterisk-based IVR use across other healthcare applications.

Emdeon Business Services