Over the past three decades, Relay has built a trusted reputation for helping school districts maximize Medicaid reimbursements and minimize administrative burden. To maintain this high bar, Associate Director of Product Operations Tara Goebel and her team work to quickly and accurately process the documentation for thousands of monthly claims.
But the tedious work of remittance advice reconciliation slowed their momentum and caused undue stress. The PDFs submitted were inconsistently structured and often 700+ pages each.
This meant Tara’s team had to look up claim numbers, compare them line by line against Medicaid’s returns, and manually enter the results into their billing system. For a single district’s remittance advice, this labor-intensive process could take more than two months and still carry a high risk of human error.
Tara knew the stakes were high for her team and even higher for their district partners. Without timely, accurate processing, it was difficult to keep track of claim approvals and denials. And in Medicaid billing, any financial reporting misstep can be costly. An unresolved overpayment can expose a district to compliance scrutiny and recoupment, while an incorrect denial can result in a missed appeal opportunity and forfeited reimbursement.
Although adding headcount would increase the team’s throughput and give them more bandwidth to catch exceptions, it would also be expensive. Plus, Tara recognized that hiring wouldn’t eliminate the inevitable risk of human error.
Recognizing that Relay’s needs extended beyond remittance advice, Tara prioritized a best‑in‑class document‑processing platform that could automatically extract remittance advice data into a clean, tabular format and support additional use cases. The right solution would require no coding, be customizable, and meet both SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance requirements.
These considerations led her directly to Lido.
Onboarding was turnkey. It took just one meeting for the Lido team to train Tara on their software, and, within a week, her whole team was using it to speed through remittance advice reconciliations.
To process a batch of remittance advice documents, Tara’s team now simply types the field names and rules in natural language and uploads the PDFs, then Lido gets to work extracting the relevant claim and payment data. If Lido identifies any mismatches or missing records, it surfaces them for the team to review and resolve. Once the data checks out, Lido organizes it into a structured spreadsheet ready for upload to Relay’s billing system.
Even at this level of automation, Tara can trust that Lido’s outputs are compliant, thanks to the platform’s HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II environment. Data is encrypted, automatically deleted, and never used to train AI models.
For Tara and her team, Lido’s speed and reliability have compressed a process that previously could take two months into a matter of hours. “I recently used Lido to process over 6,000 pages in under three hours,” she shares. “Being able to get the job done, rather than letting it hang over our heads for months, has brought my team so much peace of mind.”
Besides saving time and headaches, Lido meaningfully improves claims visibility. Tara’s team can effortlessly identify overpayments in time to return them within Medicaid’s compliance window, eliminating the threat of damaging recoupments. That same accuracy empowers the team to promptly catch and appeal invalid denials. As a result, districts are recovering reimbursements they might’ve otherwise left on the table.
The remittance advice use case was so successful that Tara’s team has begun using Lido for other document types, including paper logs. Inefficient processing of these frequently handwritten, state-specific documents can delay reimbursements longer than many districts can afford. Under Lido’s guidance, Tara’s team has built tailored extraction configurations for several states and is in the process of implementing more. This newly automated process is already leading to faster reimbursements, and as additional states come online, Tara expects Lido to empower her team to start taking on even more districts.
Processing Medicaid documents is core to how Relay serves its districts, and Tara envisions a future in which Lido streamlines every step of the workflow.
With Lido, Relay has automated the essential work of remittance advice reconciliation and is well on its way to fully automating paper log processing. Now, Tara’s team reclaims time and eliminates day-to-day busywork, the business scales without adding headcount, and school districts get accurate Medicaid reimbursements faster.
The outcomes:
Looking ahead, Tara plans to keep doubling down with Lido. They’re currently developing a configuration to optimize Relay’s annual district invoice review, which will save her team from combing through hundreds of documents by hand.
