hi, we are considering open-emr for a small office and using a vendor like office-ally. during the transition from paper to electronic there will probably be a backlog of about 100 or so edi-837 claims.
has anyone had any experience with setting up a cron job or something that will automatcially scp their 837’s at the end of the day. for this to work i beleive the vendor would need to allow for public key authentication (i would not want to store my ftp password inside of a script).
A few considerations before taking the process out of human hands.
If this is the first submission to Office Ally, it is quite likely that after running the error log, corrections will be necessary. There may be errors after submission to the clearinghouse, therefore the file ID would need to be recorded after upload. Office Ally won’t be able to help in correcting the post-submisssion errors unless the file ID is known.
A file with 100 claims is modest in size. Its upload may not take an inordinate amount of time if done manually. The upload of a file with 30 claims, even with a very slow DSL connection, takes mere seconds.
good point… i was thinking of 100 different 837’s would be a pain in the ass uploading 1-by-1 manually but wrapping them in 1 file would be logical.
for future reference if we grow into multiple offices with large volume, is there an automated procedure (probably a question for the clearinghouses).
to me it makes sense to just create ssh accounts with keys so that each user can add an event in their cron to just scp them to the remote server at midnite.
The practice should understand that the error log and subsequent corrections are important prequisites before the upload. There is no point in sending the clearinghouse a file with errors repetitively.
For the nuts and bolts of the cron job, I defer to one of the developers and the clearinghouse.