On Wed, 19 Jan 2000 Alvin B. Marcelo wrote:
> Question from an outsider:
>
> Which HCFA forms are providers required to submit in the US?
I think HCFAs, UB2s and perhaps Workers' Comp forms. They are all available
somewhere in PDF format -- just scour around a few of the AMA's pages, I
think. The doc (from the freemed project) somehow managed to find most of
the forms in both postscript and PDF. Postscript is of course easier for
the *NIX/*BSD inclined, but clashes with Windows users, for whom PDF is a
much more attractive option.
> Is there a way of connecting a HCFA electronic form to a database so that
> appropriate fields are extracted from the database, placed on the form,
and
> then printed pdf-like _using open source tools_? I know this can be done
> with Adobe Acrobat but is there an open source counterpart?
We've been mostly doing this for the past two weeks with freemed. As of
right now, we've been getting the electronic/pin-fed paper claims working,
which they seem to do now, but adaptations to PDF isn't difficult --
depending on whether you use lout or whatever your preferred languages'
internal PDF functions are. There are, of course, a wealth of those
functions for C/C++, a few for PHP, and I know there have to be some for
Perl, but I'm not familiar with the capabilities of other languages in that
respect.
If you would like to see Perl's PDF generation routines, check out txt2pdf,
which I believe you can find on freshmeat. This could easily be adapted to
simply *add* the text onto an existing PDF document, and as there are HCFA
PDFs available, this immediately becomes incredibly attractive.
Just my 2 cents.
*************************
jeff b
system administrator
university communications
university of connecticut
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
