Activation for the SMS notification service

Management and Administration
21

xiaoanri wrote on Wednesday, June 18, 2014:

hi, fsgl,

thank you for the comment, i can imagine the patient info security is really a big issue, especially after all the patient portals are alive, from so many doctors’s offices.

MD support mentioned the SMS is a paid service, is this from a third party? does Arnab’s setup come with both email and SMS? would mercury mail need a public email service to function, such as gmail or yahoo, or it is completely independent? the wiki i can find is based on windows system, i assume all the setup work is done on the openemr server, or is set up on each work stations? i have linux server, and using windows workstation.

for the above security reasons, i also think to keep the elastix is a better idea. it has ALL the communication needs integrated, and it is completely free. i thought it may not take too much to integrate them, will continue to look for the solution.

22

ahmadnajjar wrote on Wednesday, June 18, 2014:

Hello Hui et all,
Thank you for your post it clarify a lot of points, but even if it is from third party i’m fine! but i need to know how it works in the system and how can i determine the SMS service specifications.

thank you all

Seha

23

fsgl wrote on Wednesday, June 18, 2014:

Hui,

According to this tutorial, clickatell, a paid service, is required for SMS.

I get the impression from Arnab’s tutorial on Mercury Mail Configuration in Windows that SMS can be obtained along with emails. he will have to tell us if this is not the casse. Mecury Mail is part of the XAMPP/LAMPP/WAMPP packages. If you had installed Apache, MySQL & PHP5 separately, Mercury Mail will be missing. Mecury Mail should work with any email service.

But having Mercury Mail within the OpenEMR server is potentially dangerous. I read an article on securing XAMPP, advising users to always disable any components which are not needed. Mercury Mail is available but not installed in the XAMPP-OpenEMR package by default. In fact, unsecured XAMPP is a situation waiting to be exploited.

Another troubling development about federal involvement in healthcare is this Medscape article. On one hand, CMS wants us to attest to Meaningful Use, but on the other hand Congress has a “cash flow” problem because of sequestration. In effect Congress wants as much of the EHR bonus money back by auditing us. I understand that Figliozzi and Company is sending out 100-125 audit letters on a daily basis. Very schizophrenic messages coming out of Washington.

It’s best to be very careful when dealing with the feds. Even if you have no Medicare/Medicaid patients, HIPAA covers all of us irrespective of what insurance we accept.

Elastix is safer given all this Capitol stuff. My concern about Mercury Mail is the very fact it’s well integrated with OpenEMR. Remote Assistance, a program in Windows XP allowed one user to take over another computer with the email/SMS account and password of the second user. Cyber criminals would not have to re-invent the wheel as they hack their way in.

Seha,

Have a look at the second link about Mercury Mail. If Arnab does not post again, there is always the option of a second message to him. I cannot advise you because it is not something that I can work out in one of the Demo’s.

24

htuckjr wrote on Thursday, June 19, 2014:

Hi Folks-

I did some work with Mercury Mail recently, with Arnab Naha’s help, and learned quite a lot.

First, I must correct an incorrect statement I’ve seen all over the Internet about MercuryMail: MercuryMail/32 is free for personal, non- commercial use only! Officially it is intended strictly as a testing platform for developers to test their web mail apps against. Per the FAQ:

http://www.pmail.com/faqs/faqs_mwq.htm
"* How much does Mercury cost? Mercury/32 is free for
     non-commercial and personal use.  For commercial use, 
    a 60-day evaluation period is allowed, after which 
    licenses can be purchased for prices starting at US$75. 
    For more information, click here.."

Evidently, earlier versions were once free for all uses, but recent versions are conditional as the FAQ describes. This may make it a bad choice for use in a for- profit setting, particularly one as sensitive to legalities as healthcare. That link in the FAQ may have a suitable license.

For my project, I primarily wanted to configure the SMTP mail server to deliver email reminders. I did look briefly into one question about SMS so I don’t know much about it, but I found many references to the need to engage commercial SMS services, and no references to it being available free of cost.

One thing I did learn about MercuryMail/32 is that the version of XAMPP bundled with the XAMPP-OpenEMR-4.1.2 package prevents MercuryMail from saving some (though not all) configuration values to the MERCURY.INI main config file:

http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/7420.aspx
"07-29-2013, 2:19 	
Re: unable to save configuration
Make sure you're using XAMPP 1.8.3.
XAMPP 1.8.2 had this as a known bug."

In my case, I could never get the MercuryC data to save, and that was the SMTP module I needed. I don’t know what other modules were affected by that bug but I simply downloaded the newer XAMPP 1.8.3 and installed it overwriting the 1.8.2 version and that fixed that.

Arnab Naha’s tutorial to configure MercuryMail (linked by fsgl above) is thorough, and better than most other MercMail HOWTO’s I found. Very few different versions exist; one version has apparently been copied from some original source and plagiarized all over the Internet. I went with Arnab Naha’s. For me, that and XAMPP 1.8.3 did the trick.

Regards- Harley

25

fsgl wrote on Thursday, June 19, 2014:

Thanks, Harley.

Very good of you to join in.

Hope that the course work finished in a flurry of success.

This is Harley’s thread about Mercury Mail.

26

htuckjr wrote on Thursday, June 19, 2014:

Hi fsgl-

If success is measured by discovering what one does not know, my coursework finished in a veritable tornado of success! But now that’s over, I’m putting a new roof on my house, so to speak, and moving out into the IT world with my squeaky- new BS degree. That’s… Bachelor of Science… sorry, couldn’t resist the 3rd oldest joke in academia.

Responding to a few unanswered questions posed by Hui Zhu yesterday: in my reading of Arnab Naha’s tutorial I do not see that it pertains to SMS, but it delves into various SMTP settings.

Yes, Mercury Mail, or any other SMTP server like it, would need a commercial SMTP service to send out onto the internet more than a few dozen emails a day. Using yahoo or gmail’s smtp service for more than personal email from a local client (Thunderbird, Outlook) will get them blocked as spam, and the email account blacklisted. But commercial services can be very inexpensive (http://www.serversmtp.com/en/limits-of-gmail-smtp-server).

Securing MercuryMail for external operation through a firewall is certainly possible but its primary intended purpose is as a test bed or a small mail server on a LAN (http://www.pmail.com/overviews/ovw_mercury.htm). Just a little research showed how involved that task would be and I was happy I didn’t need to do it for my project!

27

fsgl wrote on Friday, June 20, 2014:

Mazel tov, Harley!

From the little video in your thread I thought that the Spamhaus block list can be circumvented. But if Mercury Mail cannot be used for SMS, then there is no point beating a dead horse.

The only free service left is elastix, unless Seha wants to pay tm4b to get it going.

28

toddjones wrote on Friday, June 20, 2014:

what about using https://www.twilio.com it only has a nominal charge

29

fsgl wrote on Friday, June 20, 2014:

It’s a penny per message for Saudi Arabia (don’t know Seha’s exact location).

How easy is it to set up and use?

30

hitechelp wrote on Friday, June 20, 2014:

It’s fairly easy. It took us about an hour including the sign-up with
Twilio and we’re glad we went that route. Works flawlessly and no more
phone calls.

We’ve been using
On Jun 19, 2014 5:13 PM, “fsgl” fsgl@users.sf.net wrote:

It’s a penny per message for Saudi Arabia (don’t know Seha’s exact
location).

How easy is it to set up and use?

Activation for the SMS notification service

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31

toddjones wrote on Friday, June 20, 2014:

David, are you using twilio for appointment reminders?

32

hitechelp wrote on Friday, June 20, 2014:

Yes
On Jun 20, 2014 9:13 AM, “Todd Jones” toddjones@users.sf.net wrote:

David, are you using twilio for appointment reminders?

Activation for the SMS notification service
https://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/202505/thread/1a022611/?limit=25&page=1#fb18

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33

bradymiller wrote on Saturday, June 21, 2014:

Hi,

Is twilio easy to work with OpenEMR currently?

Here’s some code that was donated by NetConnexions to integrate Twilio. Note it still needs quite a bit of work if anybody wants to take it on:
https://github.com/bradymiller/openemr/commit/eb676a4665b95a7743e3eeabf0d85f17ef8b1676

-brady
OpenEMR

34

toddjones wrote on Saturday, June 21, 2014:

David, are you using for SMS and voice call reminders? We are having some issues with leaving the message on an answering machine. SMS no problems…

35

hitechelp wrote on Sunday, June 22, 2014:

We found it quite easy to set up. Getting the SMS messages to show the
date & time in the format we wanted was the only real work involved.
On Jun 20, 2014 11:06 PM, “Brady Miller” bradymiller@users.sf.net wrote:

Hi,

Is twilio easy to work with OpenEMR currently?

Here’s some code that was donated by NetConnexions to integrate Twilio.
Note it still needs quite a bit of work if anybody wants to take it on:

Twilio contribution, take 1. · bradymiller/openemr@eb676a4 · GitHub

-brady
OpenEMR http://www.open-emr.org/

Activation for the SMS notification service
https://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/202505/thread/1a022611/?limit=25&page=1#ced2

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36

hitechelp wrote on Sunday, June 22, 2014:

SMS only.
On Jun 21, 2014 7:44 AM, “Todd Jones” toddjones@users.sf.net wrote:

David, are you using for SMS and voice call reminders? We are having some
issues with leaving the message on an answering machine. SMS no problems…

Activation for the SMS notification service
https://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/202505/thread/1a022611/?limit=25&page=1#2cd6

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37

blankev wrote on Sunday, June 22, 2014:

I am a paying SKYPE user for many years. How difficult would it be to implement Skype in OpenEMR? Somebody must have thought of this in the past… I am very interested in an any answer.

Tnx in advance

38

sunsetsystems wrote on Sunday, June 22, 2014:

Interesting question, so I did a search. Looks like Skype used to have an API for messaging, but with the Microsoft takeover that’s gone now.

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA214/what-is-the-desktop-api

Rod
http://www.sunsetsystems.com/

39

ahmadnajjar wrote on Sunday, June 22, 2014:

Hello fsgel et all

thank you all for your efforts, sorry for not joining the discuss last couple of days! i had some personal issues.

in regard of pay tm4b service, yes I’m ready to pay for this service but i ned to know how can i do that.
and if there is something free it will be better, i have tried to follow the links and instructions in the previous posts, but i lost!! please if you have some quick instruction how can i do it.

again thank you all for your help.

Seha

40

fsgl wrote on Sunday, June 22, 2014:

Both twilio and tm4b have free trials with pricing on their respective websites. It’s a penny per message for twilio in Saudi Arabia (don’t know your location). The pricing on tm4b is in pounds sterling per month, so I glossed over it because it’s not “real money” and I was too lazy to look up the official exchange rate.

Todd & David seem to think that twilio is easy to use. I have no idea about tm4b, but that’s what the free trial is for. Hui posted that elastix is free, but hard to install.

The ultimate question boils down to this: whether to spend time or money. Not everyone is as frugal as yours truly, who would expend tens of man hours to avoid spending a few pennies. Vive la différence!

Hang out at the 3 websites for a bit of time. Come back and tell us what you decided and why.