Can your coworkers work in healthcare?

For those of you who work in the healthcare industry, it comes as no surprise that things have to be checked, double checked, and then for good measure, checked again (not that this always happens, but that's the hope). One of the things that has to be reviewed is the list of people that work with patient information and to ensure that they are not part of any "special" lists. The main ones are:

• The US Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List
• The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) Exclusion List
• The System for Award Management (SAM) Exclusion List
• FDA Clinical Investigations Disqualification Proceedings
• FDA Debarment List (Drug Product Applications)
• US Military TRICARE Sanction List

All of these provide some sort of web search interface (SDN, OIG, SAM), but this gets a bit tedious there are more than 3 employees... especially if you have to check this for every employee every month (which we do).

As such, I put together a simple python script that checks a list of people against all three lists by downloading the actual exclusion lists. The lists that it downloads are:

• SDN: https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt
• OIG: http://oig.hhs.gov/exclusions/downloadables/updatedleie.txt
• SAM: https://www.sam.gov/public-extracts/SAM-Public/SAM_Exclusions_Public_Extract.ZIP
• FDA: http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/SDA/sdExportData.cfm?sd=clinicalinvestigatorsdisqualificationproceedings&exportType=csv

You may have noticed that there are no downloads for the FDA Debarment List (Drug Product Applications) and the TRICARE excluded provider sanction list. Unfortunately, those lists aren't available for download, and so this script scrapes the appropriate sites to obtain the lists.

It's nothing fancy and doesn't cover all cases, but it should be enough to get you started. Note, you will still have to perform actual background checks as well, but this can be run more frequently. You can run the script via:

python background_exclusion_check.py

Note, you will need to have requests installed as it uses that to download the files. In case you don't feel like going over to github to take a look at the code, here it is in full.

Python Wrapper around Zoom.us REST API

We just released a python wrapper around the zoom.us REST API at work. Before going any further, I'd like to send a big shoutout to Màxim Colls who wrote the Ruby Gem with the same name that this work was based on.

The library is on Pypi and can easily be installed via pip:

pip install zoomus

As you would expect, this wrapper just makes some of the usual things you do with the Zoom API a little easier. For example, this is how you would list all of the meetings that the users in your account have.

from zoomus import ZoomClient

client = ZoomClient('API_KEY', 'API_SECRET')

for user in client.user.list():
    user_id = user['id']
    print client.meeting.list('host_id': user_id)

As it currently stands this library is still in beta, but we will be adding a couple enhancements in the not too distant future (e.g. better error handling). Of course, you are always welcome to contribute to the github project. Hopefully this will be useful to you as well!

Need to convert your large Excel file to MediaWiki format?

I had to convert a 300 row Excel file to the MediaWiki format. There are a couple existing converters that exist (see this StackOverflow post), but none of them really suited my needs. So, instead I quickly wrote a python script that does this conversion using the xlrd library. It's nothing fancy (nor is it the prettiest or most robust script), but it does the trick. Hopefully this is useful to someone at some point!