Form Management Software?

javac asks: "I am working at a doctor's office for the summer. With all the regulations of HMO's and PPO's and stuff we spend more time filling out forms than seeing patients. Do you know of any good software for automatically filling out forms. It should be able to connect to a database (which we already have) and completely fill out the basic info from a name or SSN. Anyway, I am sure many other business people find forms a pain too. The software doesn't have to be for Linux, but it is always a plus." I suspect that, depending on the forms involved, that this might have to be a custom application. Does anyone know of any software that's designed to assist in the completion of generic forms?

Commercial Product Endorsement: Lotus Notes

[scotpurl]

About two years ago, I was hired by a company to support Lotus Notes on unix workstations. Hadn't seen it before, but I was smart enought to know that most unix commands were the first two consonants put together (cp, rm, mv). Now I've gotten into the development side, and beyond.

For those not familiar with Notes, it's basically email, calendaring, and a non-relational database put together, with the ability to run code based upon values, actions, database lookups, etc. I've done several applications that store information in a database, using a variety of forms. A co-worker said he even saw someone who had a widget that allowed you to fill out PDF forms on the web, and then linked the fields on the back end into a Notes database. There's also products like Pylon Pro that will allow you to synchronize a Lotus Notes database with a Palm Pilot database.

Oh, and Notes runs on a Linux server, but not as a client. However, Notes has decent web access to things. Go to href="http://www.lotus.com/dominolinux">http://www .lotus.com/dominolinux for a 90-day working demo.

Acrobat

[igaborf]

This could be done using Adobe Acrobat (sorry, non-Linux) plus some CGI-type software to bridge between Acrobat and the database system. Briefly, you get the form into PDF (scanning it and importing into Acrobat will do), then in Acrobat you define the fillable parts of the form (which are scriptable using JavaScript). Your data-capture application then emits an Adode FDF (forms data format) file that can be imported into the form in Acrobat. I think you can implement a more turnkey solution using either custom Acrobat plug-ins or perhaps the FDF toolkit [adobe.com] but have no experience doing so.

Note: You need the full version of Acrobat; Acrobat Reader won't cut it.

Check the scanner software

[Kefaa]

My sister in law worked for a doctor a while back. He used his scanner to scan the forms and the scanner came with software to identify "fields" that could be entered.

I do not know the brand, but I have seen several scanners taht offered similar software in the past. IF they have one, look at the software theat came with it.

App written specifically for that

[drix]

Caere (makers of OmniPage OCR sw) have OmniForm [caere.com] which was basically written for exactly what you are talking about. You are able to scan in forms with the software and then mark individual fields within the forms, thereby creating a form template. You can also idiot proof the forms by designating areas of the form that can only have certain values (e.g. drop-down boxes), etc. We have used this software in our office for months now and it's a godsend in terms of saving time. I highly reccomend. Also, the latest version has CGI support via Perl, supposedly - so you don't really need to use Windows except for the "server" computer.

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ReportLab

[Jess]

You may want to have a look at ReportLab [reportlab.com]. It is a very impressive package written in Python that can be used to generate PDF reports. They have several examples including a medical insurance form [reportlab.com]. It would probably take some time to set things up, but you could have a totally automated system.

We hack PCL files directly

[Citrix]

I work at a small time bank and basically what we do is insert the text into a PCL file.
It is real easy as a PCL is somewhat easy to hack. Here are the steps:

1. Create a PCL of the form you want to auto fill. (We usually use PageMaker) and print to file with a HP LaserJet printer driver. (PCL is HP's perfered format)
2. We then use a ruler to measure the X, Y coords for the files (Hight tech, eh)
3. We then dump the PCL to the printer but we stop right before the end
4. Then you output the PCL goto X Y command, maybe change the font, and output the text string
5. then we tell the printer we're finished with the page

It ain't a pretty hack but it works nicly for us. We've written some custom scripts and I don't know the PCL off the top of my head but everything I found was via google.

My 2c on the Dr. Office and safty issue, as long and the DR. is forced to key data in and verify it there is nothing wrong with autofilling forms. You just have to be more clever then the person keying in data. We use prompts that change order or somtimes require doulble entry to keep the users from just going thought the motions.
Feel free to email me about how we did it but I can't offer too much help :-( I keep pretty busy.
Citrix

Why doctors cant use auto-form stuff.

[jdigital]

Being a final year med student, who as done a fair bit of form filling whilst working the rounds at hospitals, i realise there are lots of legal reasons why doctors cant automatically fill out forms. You cant have 'the usual options' selected, to make your life easier, because the whole point is that you think about the choices you make before you submit the form. If a form has redundant fields, its either because its a badly designed form, or because it has been shown that people need to fill the same thing out twice to double check what they are doing. Imagine how much easier it would be for a doctor to screw up if instead of having to write a patient name and number down, for a pharmacy order, he only wrote the number -- what happens if he/she screws up a digit -- then there is nothing for the pharmacist to cross check against.

-- Once again, a stupid question has been posted to Ask Slashdot.