results

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NPI Search Redundancy

Most healthcare professionals know at this point that all providers of health care, require NPI (National Provider Identifier) numbers. Without one, it will become increasingly difficult for claims to be paid by commercial payers, and impossible to collect medicare and medicaid payments. Since we are a coding/billing/collection/management agency, we have frequented the NPPES (National Plan & Provider Enumeration System) to lookup NPI information. Unfortunately, there have been brief periods of downtime of the site, causing us to implement our own solution: a backup of the registry. I have a daily cron job that downloads the NPI database, push it into MySQL, giving us an albeit slow, but accurate access to an off-line version of this data. The shell script below performs the retrieval: #!/bin/sh WORKDIR="/srv/htdocs/npi" LOG="$WORKDIR/npi.log" MONTH=`date +%b` LASTMONTH=`date +%b --date='1 month ago'` YEAR=`date +%Y` URL="http://nppesdata.cms.h
Read more

freeFTPD

Image
Image by Micah68 via Flickr I've been using FileZilla FTP server for some time now and have been happy for the performance. Recently, we needed the ability to expose the FTP service to another client, and the documents that we'd be receiving would be arriving in an un-encrypted form, unlike our other clients. I decided I could simply enable FTPS , the SSL enabled FTP protocol and open a port to 990 on my ASA 5525 Security Appliance and NAT traffic to our server. Unfortunately I quickly found out that a passive FTPS server behind my firewall won't work without some specific configuration changes as discussed in this article . With all that fussing around, I decided to check out freeFTPd, a single deamon that offers both FTP and SFTP, not to be confused with FTPS, but the secure file transfer protocol that is common to the SSH ( secure shell ) protocol. It's fairly straight forward, but is a bit quirky and the documentation is non-existent. Follow some of my ti
Read more

Using ImageMagick and Tesseract to sort TIFFs on Windows

Image
Recently I wrote a post about my search for a TIFF iFilter that would enable me to use VBScript to query a Windows Indexing Services server for file management. I found that since OCR is never always 100% accurate, neither were my attempts at sorting all the inbound EMR faxes we get each day. I did however, find Tesseract , a great product that was originally developed by HP and proprietary, and is now developed by Google and licensed under the Apache License v2, open source . It is one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. It is quite basic, and in the version you obtain from the project page , it only operates from the command line, and without the libtiff library, will only do it's work on un-compressed TIFFs. More information can be found on the project pages , and Wikipedia . Doing some scouring, I aso found a front-end , and ArchivistaBox, a complete document management system . Image via Wikipedia I'm using it in Windows, so I needed to do one of
Read more