Much to our chagrin, faxing is still a predominant mode of communication in healthcare. As a result, it is very common for providers and hospitals to communicate via fax. In order to better facilitate the transfer of these faxes and documents between hospitals and providers, we designed and built FaxAttach: a service that allows hospitals to print out a cover sheet, fax it to a single number, and have it show up attached to the correct referral.

FaxAttach 'secret sauce' is the 8 character code printed on the cover page that is then OCR'd in the FaxAttach server. This allows the server to determine which referral the attachment belongs to.

FaxAttach was built as a separate application due to lack of OCR libraries available on Heroku. Even if they were available, it likely makes more sense to separate the functionality into its own application.

• RingCentral (gives us a number to accept faxes, and then emails faxes to an email)
• PostmarkApp (calls an API endpoint when an email is received)

1. The fax is received by RingCentral
2. RingCentral emails PostmarkApp with the pdf attached
3. PostmarkApp sends a call to Aidin - /inbound with a JSON version of the email
4. Aidin decrypts the base64 encoded attachment and creates a new pdf file
5. This pdf file is uploaded to S3
6. The S3 path is sent to FaxAttach /process, along with the local path
7. FaxAttach extracts the code (OCR), and calls /register in Aidin with the code and local path
8. Aidin creates a new attachment for the referral that corresponds to the code

FaxAttach is running on an EC2 instance and is served through:

• Nginx
• Phusion Passenger
• Unicorn

• Sinatra (Rails was overkill for such a simple app)
• Capistrano (for easy deployment)
• Docsplit (deals with the OCR)
• RestClient (easy GET and POST requests)

Assuming you've already gotten Ruby, RVM, and Bundler set up, do the following

• brew install graphicsmagick imagemagick ghostscript tesseract tesseract-ocr
• Download and install pdftk
• Download and install libreoffice

Clone this repository, cd into it, and run bundle install

After this, you can start FaxAttach by running rackup inside the FaxAttach directory. Keep in mind you may have to change the paths in faxattach.rb in Aidin to test locally. You'll want to change the FaxAttach path to localhost:9292 instead of faxattach.staging.myaidin.com

To push changes to staging, make sure you've committed and pushed your changes to github, then run cap deploy

Once you have the app running with rackup you now need to make sure it works.

Open up CyberDuck (or something similar), and get a signed url for an example scanned pdf. Go to your terminal, and type curl --data "path=URL&local=something.pdf" http://localhost:9292/process

Replace URL with the signed url you have. Local doesn't matter at this point, it's only important when you're running FaxAttach through the Aidin app.