Hello! I was looking to see if anyone has tried converting an EOB back to it's 835 form? I wanted to see what was out there before I tried re-inventing the wheel.

Response 1:

I did some surface-level research on this and also checked in with a couple of our internal solution architects.

An EOB and an ANSI X12 835 usually contain the same payment data, but they’re fundamentally different formats. An EOB is human-readable (PDF/paper), while an 835 is a structured EDI transaction, so conversion isn’t just a file change — it requires structured data extraction and mapping logic.

There are vendors in the market that do this using OCR/IDP + business rules (e.g., Stedi/Anatomy, MediStreams, etc.), since payer formats vary widely and generating a compliant 835 can get complex.

That said, depending on the use case, this could also be approached as a Document Understanding + mapping workflow. Happy to think through it further if helpful.

Response 2:
Regarding the 835 EDI structure, X12 has documentation published to show the file specs structure and format: https://x12.org/examples/005010x221. From the examples in the link, you can begin to establish the data points and/or service line structure for what needs to be scraped from the EOB and converted to the 835 EDI format.

To Jorge's point above, the process would look something like:

1. Identify scenario that requires EOB conversion (no electronic transfer capability/secondary adjudication/etc)

2. OCR/IXP type process to extract relevant adjudication values

3. Conversion to 835 EDI

4. Send/Load 835 file for posting