Hylafax with OpenEMR

Management and Administration
#1

deschel wrote on Thursday, May 01, 2014:

I am trying to figure out how I can configure OpenEMR to work with Hylafax.

I looked on the Wiki and in the forums to be surprised to find almost no information on how to do this. Maybe I missed it. Can anyone provide me with any links to this information?

My goal is to host OpenEMR on a virtual server with a commercial web provider. I would like to have hylafax running on a small cheap linux box in my office attached to the telephone line with a fax modem. The linux box with hylafax in my office would then send the faxes to OpenEMR via the internet to OpenEMR being hosted on the internet.

My first question is: Is this feasible, doable, and secure?

Hylafax will be running on a network that is separate from where OpenEMR will be running.

Is there away to have the fax data be sent securely from hylafax to openEMR? In the set up, I don’t see a way to use passwords for fax clients to access hylafax (in this case OpenEMR being the fax client).

In hylafax, I see that you can select and restrict which IP addresses that hylafax is allowed to communicate with. I guess that this provides some level of security, but not a very good one, or is it? Can someone spoof your ip address?

Through clicking on menus/preferences (since there is no documentation that I can find), I see that to set up Hylafax in OpenEMR, you do the following:

Go To: Administration --> Globals --> Miscellaneous
Click: Enable Hylafax Support
Enter: Hylafax Server
Enter: Hylafax Directory

Is Hylafax Server an ip or web address? Do I just enter the internet address of my office, and direct the firewall to direct the ports that hylafax uses to my server.

Is there a way to password protect access?

I have not set up my linux box with hylafax first. I want to know if this is feasible before I take the time to do this.

David Eschelbacher MD

#2

cmswest wrote on Friday, May 02, 2014:

the only way to do this is to remotely mount a directory, see the discussion here for starters:

https://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/202504/thread/3fcdc43b?page=0

#3

deschel wrote on Friday, May 02, 2014:

I think I need a little more understanding in how OpenEMR interacts with Hylafax.

For incoming faxes, does Hylafax even communicate with OpenEMR? Or, does OpenEMR just access the directory where the files (images/PDFs) of the incoming faxes are stored and display the list of files in that directory?

Or, is there more to it?

Does that mean that “Hylafax Directory” can be any directory that faxes are copied/sent to, without even needing to be from Hylafax?

David Eschelbacher MD

#4

cmswest wrote on Friday, May 02, 2014:

yes, hylafax just interacts with the os and filesystem

#5

fsgl wrote on Friday, May 02, 2014:

A basic question, what’s the volume of documents that needs to be faxed daily?

If it’s the occasional letter of consultation, it would seem simpler to have staff do it manually.

Any time Protected Health Information is conveyed over the Internet, it can be mugged. If the document reaches the intended recipient via manual transmission, this would be the safer method.

#6

deschel wrote on Friday, May 02, 2014:

For most US physician offices, staff “doing it manually” is an impractical option.

Most physician offices in the US live and die by fax, and deal with faxing at a fairly high volume. That is probably the main reason why hylafax integration was developed. And, I’m sure that there are quite a few practices using it.

I would like to get more detail from the practices that are implementing hylafax to get an idea of how to do it and the best way to do it.

My office does a higher volume of faxing than most because I deal with a lot of home health nursing, which requires huge amount of paperwork. My office handles 200 - 500 pages per day of faxes. “Manual” would be impossible, and too labor intensive. Also, I thought the point of an EMR is to avoid “Manual”.

If hylafax just deals with the file system, I guess that I can write a script to have documents sent from the hylafax server to OpenEMR via sFTP over the internet.

This should be extremely secure.

Does OpenEMR have a way to get the sender information (like caller ID telephone number) and fax header? This information would not be in the image files in the fax folder. How is this done?

I’d like to hear from some people who have integrated hylafax.

And, I’m sure other practices/implementers would benefit from this information.

David Eschelbacher MD

#7

cmswest wrote on Saturday, May 03, 2014:

the nice thing that openemr does with hylafx (courtesy of rod roark i believe) is collect all documents in a central location and allows you to upload select pages from the fax or scan directly into the patient’s document repository

#8

fsgl wrote on Sunday, May 04, 2014:

Well written HylaFAX FAQ and Documentation section.

Hyla = genus for tree frogs.

#9

penguin8r wrote on Thursday, May 29, 2014:

We have a running install with 3 dedicated fax modems (2 incoming, 1 for outbound transmissions), & the system handles 5000+ incoming faxes per month. Not sure how many pages per day it translates into, but it’s a significant volume.
The HylaFax interface within OpenEMR will show you the senders TSID of the fax job, and how many pages it contains (hat tip to Rod for his excellent work there).
From there you can view the fax and insert content from it into a patient’s chart.
HylaFax can be run on the same physical server as OpenEMR, or hosted on separate hardware, provided you have some form of direct network access to the HylaFax server and its filesystem from the OpenEMR host.
Security is basically dependent on setting up your HylaFax system (and any links between servers, if HylaFax is on a different host) properly, although it would be nice to have a fax access security layer within OpenEMR, if somebody wanted to contribute to development of such a thing.
For the most part, it works very well, although I recently discovered that if you have pseudo-phone lines provided by a cable ISP, they are less than optimal for use with fax modems.

#10

Dr. Eschelbacher,

Did you ever get the Hylafax working with your OpenEMR? I don’t have a sophisticated set-up as yours but I am just at lost on what to do next. I have OpenEMR 4.2 running on Windows 7 and my Hylafax server is on Ubuntu 16.04 on same subnet. I enabled the Hylafax support on Admin and entered 192.168.X.X:4559 (Hylafax server) and left the default Hylafax directory as assigned by OpenEMR on set-up. What am I missing? Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Charlie