John Croson's Blog Home

I was trying to find a quick and dirty method of exporting, and subsequently importing CSV data into MS SQL; programmatically. I'm dealing with rather small amounts of data, so this method may not work for many, but it Works For Me (tm). My source data comes from an AIX / uSQL box running Misys Tiger. Yes, I realize I could query that database directly, if I purchased the Transoft ODBC drivers for Server 2003, but at a couple grand it's much more cost effective to do it this way. The easiest method to retrieve my data is to use Misys Query, create a scheduled job, and export the resulting data to a network location for DTS (Data Transformation Services) to pick it up. The data is a rather exhaustive list of Insurance Companies, and their related plans. As one could imagine, this data is ever changing, a result of new "product lines" being developed by the lumbering health engine we call commercial payors. In the past, we exported the reports to PDF, and used the buil...

I've looked around a bit for a utility for highlighting my code samples here on BlogSpot, and found a couple of useful tools. The first is code2html , which has been around for some time, and turns your perl, python and other types into pretty, formatted html. It works well, is CGI, but has some limits to its' implementation. Then I found a great swiss-army knife of a utility, called highlight.js . It will automatically detect code blocks, and highlight them for you. It does have issues with too much code, or intermixed code on one page, but does a nice job. If it fails to correctly identify your code, a sample export page is included with the package that allows you to manually format your code to html. Happy highlighting!

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...