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Availity: An API for Health Insurance

By Patrick Lewis
November 16, 2020

Photo by Sergio Santos, used under CC BY 2.0, cropped from original.

I have been working on a tele-therapy application for a client in the health care industry over the past few months and had the opportunity to do some interesting work in the area of health insurance coverages and claims.

I was tasked with creating an integration of the Availity API for insurance coverages which provides the ability to make requests for details about a patient’s health insurance coverage and returns responses containing information like the patient’s primary care doctor, their copay amounts, and their deductibles.

The ability to query this health insurance information from an API in an automated fashion helps streamline the process of billing clients by validating their health insurance details and also determining what a patient’s financial responsibility will be for their online therapy sessions. Availity provides information for over 11,000 insurance companies; a full list of supported payers is available on their site via a web interface and a downloadable CSV file.

Availity provides both REST and SOAP APIs in addition to a batch processing system that functions over SFTP. For the purposes of …

Job opening: Java & JavaScript developer

By Jon Jensen
November 13, 2020

This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.

We are seeking a full-time Java software engineer to work with us on our clients’ applications.

End Point is an Internet technology consulting company based in New York City, with 50 employees serving many clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations. The company turned 25 years old this year!

Even before the pandemic most of us worked remotely from home offices. We collaborate using SSH, Git, project tracking tools, Zulip chat, video conferencing, and of course email and phones.

What you will be doing:

• Develop new web applications and support existing ones for our clients
• Work together with End Point co-workers and our clients’ in-house staff
• Use your desktop OS of choice: Linux, macOS, Windows
• Use open source tools and contribute back as opportunity arises

What you bring:

Professional experience developing and supporting web applications in these technical areas:

• 3+ years of development with Java and front-end JavaScript
• Frameworks and libraries such as Wildfly, Hibernate, Spring, Struts, Play, and Vue.js, React, Angular
• Databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Solr, Elasticsearch, etc.
• Security consciousness
• Git version control
• Automated testing …

Job opening: PostgreSQL database administrator & developer

By Jon Jensen
November 13, 2020

This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.

Photo by manhhai, cropped & filtered, CC BY 2.0

We are seeking a full-time PostgreSQL database administrator and developer to support and consult with our clients. For this role we prefer those living in the Western Hemisphere.

End Point is an Internet technology consulting company based in New York City, with 50 employees serving many clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations. The company turned 25 years old this year!

Even before the pandemic most of us worked remotely from home offices. We collaborate using SSH, Git, project tracking tools, Zulip chat, video conferencing, and of course email and phones.

What you bring:

5+ years of hands-on professional experience and technical expertise with:

• Database design and systems architecture
• Advanced SQL and query optimization
• Programming for web applications, stored procedures, and scripting, in Ruby, Java, Python, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, C#, Go, PL/pgSQL, bash, etc.
• Performance tuning, scalability, connection pooling
• Cloud database hosting services, especially at AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure
• Security and encryption
• Replication, PITR, backup, monitoring, and relevant tools
• HA, failover, and disaster …

Rapid Test-Driven Development in Julia

By Kamil Ciemniewski
November 9, 2020

[//]: # ( Kamil wrote: image I’ve obtained from www.freepik.com where I have a paid account. The license type says: Premium license (Unlimited use without attribution). https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/isometric-automated-production-line-concept-with-industrial-conveyor-belt-robotic-mechanical-arms-isolated_10055534.htm )

The Julia programming language has been rising in the ranks among the science-oriented programming languages lately. It has proven to be revolutionary in many ways. I’ve been watching its development for years now. It’s one of the most innovative of all the modern programming languages.

Julia’s design seems to be driven by two goals: to appeal to the scientific community and to achieve the best performance possible. This is an attempt to solve the “two languages problem” where data analysis and model building is performed using a slower interpreted language (like R or Python) while performance-critical parts are written in a faster language like C or C++.

The type-system is what allows Julia to meet its goals. The mix of strong and dynamic typing enables Python-like productivity with C++ or Rust-like performance. Julia is not an interpreted language. It …

.NET 5 will be released at .NET Conf 2020

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
November 4, 2020

.NET — A unified platform by Microsoft

Last year, at .NET Conf 2019, Microsoft announced that the new .NET 5 will have a base class library that will allow creation of any type of application for any platform — Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and IoT. And that’s finally about to happen: .NET 5 will be launched at .NET Conf 2020, starting November 10th!

According to Microsoft, .NET 5 will take the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono and merge them into one framework, offering the same experience for all developers, regardless of the type of application or platform targeted. It will also include two different compiler models: just-in-time (JIT, prepared for client-server and desktop apps) and static compilation with ahead-of-time (AOT, optimized to decrease startup times, ideal for mobile and IoT devices).

Some of the key features will be:

Windows Desktop development (WPF/​Windows Forms/​UWP)

This was already a part of the current .NET Core 3 release, and it will stay while getting some updates like a Chromium-based WebView control, improvements to the visual designer, and customizable task dialogs. It will also include all the latest features of C# 8.

Full-stack web …

Craft: A CMS for developers

By Kevin Campusano
October 31, 2020

As a software engineer, I thrive and thoroughly enjoy working on fully custom software products, applications conceived to model and help in the execution of some business process and that are built from the ground up by a team of developers.

Such projects are often complex and expensive, though, and for some clients, they can be overkill. Some clients come up with requirements that are better served by off-the-shelf software solutions. One group of such solutions are content management systems (CMS). As a rule of thumb, if a client wants a website whose main purpose is to showcase some content, their brand or image, and custom business logic requirements are limited, then chances are that a CMS will fit the bill nicely.

Lately we’ve been using the Craft CMS for a client that meets the aforementioned criteria, and I gotta say, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the developer experience it offers.

Unlike most of the technology and products we discuss in our blog, Craft CMS is not Open Source or Free Software. The source code is readily available in GitHub for anybody to use, study, and modify, but commercial use of it is restricted and certain features are exclusive to a so-called …

EMSA: Electronic Messaging Staging Area

By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
October 30, 2020

Photo by Lee Roberts, CC BY-SA 2.0

End Point has been involved with developing disease surveillance software for over a decade. One component of that work is EMSA, short for “Electronic Messaging Staging Area”.

The EMSA system we’re currently using was developed by a consortium of states led by Utah, Kansas, and Nevada. It is a PHP web application and can be hosted in the cloud or on-premises as you would any other PHP application.

EMSA:

• Is an ingest system for HL7 or CSV-formatted lab reports from doctor offices, labs, and other official reporting groups.
• Allows exporting XML output to your disease surveillance system.
• Is a web console for managing messages.
• Allows you to see messages that are malformed.
• Has configurable rules for disease types and message routing; some messages may go directly into a surveillance system while others may be stored for later.
• Has configurable “automated workflows” to validate message information and perform tasks.
• Can be connected to a BI (Business Intelligence) tool for reporting, or the database can be queried directly.
• Works with integration packages like Rhapsody to bring in data from other systems.

End Point has also made custom …

Detecting gaps in time-series data in PostgreSQL

By David Christensen
October 26, 2020

Photo by Phoebe Baker

A client has a number of data feeds that are supposed to update at regular intervals. Like most things in the universe (thanks, entropy!) this does not always end up working out the way we want. We recently discovered that some of the data had not loaded as expected, and were brought in to assess the extent of the issue.

There were 2 main feeds that had issues, with different types of time data. The first had date-based data with batches and the second had full-range timestamps. We will examine each type individually, since they have similar — but not the same — characteristics.

Date-based, with batches

In the first data feed there was a table which tracked which files had been loaded by file date and batch number (there was a morning/​evening batch designated by a batch field with either A or B). Since the files that had not loaded successfully did not have entries in this table we could find that one or both of the day’s batch files would be missing, but since the table tracked those which did get loaded, we needed to turn this list into something useful.

Any time I find myself considering sequences of data, I remember my friend generate_series(). While …