How to embed fillable PDF and submit electronically to a cloud site
September 7, 2020 7:09 PM Subscribe
I'm not sure that this is even possible, but I'd like to take a fillable PDF form and embed it in a web page such that a user can go online, fill out the form – and then have the form be submitted electronically to a cloud location (preferrably Google Drive).
The human resources department at my workplace is trying to go paperless for open enrollment (signing up for health insurance). Our two insurance companies both offer fillable PDFs that will need to be completed by staff. It would be simple to email the forms to everyone and ask them to return the completed forms by email. But the stumbling block here is that HIPAA privacy regulations prohibit the use of email for transmitting these types of documents.
So my thought was to embed the forms in web pages and send an all-staff email message with a link to the pages. Upon completing the form, the user would hit the "Submit" button, and the form would go to a Google Drive location (our organization uses G Suite). But I'm starting to think that this isn't possible.
I tested two apps that made promising-sounding claims about being able to do this, or something like it. The apps are JotForm and pdfFiller. However, both apps suffer from the same problem: They don't actually embed the fillable PDF document directly. Instead, they first have you upload the fillable PDF, and then they automatically convert the document into a web form. pdfFiller does a slightly better job at the conversion process, but they're both pretty crappy and end up with weird formatting errors. The insurance companies are probably not going to accept some mangled version of their forms.
The alternative, of course, is to have people fill out the forms on the computer, print the resulting documents on paper, and then hand the hard-copies into HR. But some of our staff are working from home, so they'd have to mail the forms by postal mail or drive them to the workplace, which would be a hassle.
Not sure that there is any easy solution here. So I'm throwing this out there in case anyone has any options that I may have missed.
The human resources department at my workplace is trying to go paperless for open enrollment (signing up for health insurance). Our two insurance companies both offer fillable PDFs that will need to be completed by staff. It would be simple to email the forms to everyone and ask them to return the completed forms by email. But the stumbling block here is that HIPAA privacy regulations prohibit the use of email for transmitting these types of documents.
So my thought was to embed the forms in web pages and send an all-staff email message with a link to the pages. Upon completing the form, the user would hit the "Submit" button, and the form would go to a Google Drive location (our organization uses G Suite). But I'm starting to think that this isn't possible.
I tested two apps that made promising-sounding claims about being able to do this, or something like it. The apps are JotForm and pdfFiller. However, both apps suffer from the same problem: They don't actually embed the fillable PDF document directly. Instead, they first have you upload the fillable PDF, and then they automatically convert the document into a web form. pdfFiller does a slightly better job at the conversion process, but they're both pretty crappy and end up with weird formatting errors. The insurance companies are probably not going to accept some mangled version of their forms.
The alternative, of course, is to have people fill out the forms on the computer, print the resulting documents on paper, and then hand the hard-copies into HR. But some of our staff are working from home, so they'd have to mail the forms by postal mail or drive them to the workplace, which would be a hassle.
Not sure that there is any easy solution here. So I'm throwing this out there in case anyone has any options that I may have missed.
You could use Google Forms, export the responses to a spreadsheet, and then use the spreadsheet data to fill out the PDF forms in house.
Whether Google Forms will meet the HIPPA requirements, I don't know.
posted by yohko at 8:06 PM on September 7, 2020
Whether Google Forms will meet the HIPPA requirements, I don't know.
posted by yohko at 8:06 PM on September 7, 2020
If your G Suite is HIPAA compliant, could you email the PDFs to everyone and have them fill them out, then save the PDF to their own Google Drive folder and share the document with a specific HR person?
posted by current resident at 8:15 PM on September 7, 2020
posted by current resident at 8:15 PM on September 7, 2020
Ive been looking for something like this for a while (decades) , theres a bunch of hokey PDF plugins signature/form systems out there, but without having to do any type of programming, Adobe's 'Adobe Sign' product/service is the most intuitive and simple start-and-go system i have come across in the recent years. There is no 'free' tier, but the beginner tier would be reasonable to try.
posted by edman at 9:22 PM on September 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by edman at 9:22 PM on September 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
Collabora's edition of LibreOffice Online is called Collabora Online. LibreOffice handles PDF forms adequately, the same code is run on your web server and has file management on your server side. The self-hosted version is Collabora Online Development Edition.
posted by k3ninho at 12:00 AM on September 8, 2020
posted by k3ninho at 12:00 AM on September 8, 2020
Response by poster: Update: The insurance reps said that we could modify their forms, so we're going to create two JotForms that contain the same fields as the fillable PDFs. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.
posted by alex1965 at 9:43 AM on September 11, 2020
posted by alex1965 at 9:43 AM on September 11, 2020
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Have you or someone reached out to the insurance companies you partner with, to see if their IT has developed a solution for this? That might not be a bad idea, I know some providers have turnkey portals (that are brandable with your organization's logo/wording) that companies can use on their benefits/open enrollment pages that perform functions similar to what you're thinking of.
the stumbling block here is that HIPAA privacy regulations prohibit the use of email for transmitting these types of documents.
This is a sidebar to your question, but another thing to consider as you're designing a solution is that G Suite is not HIPAA compliant by default. There's several steps that have to be taken in order to make it HIPAA compliant for your organization, so if you find a good way to do what you wish to do, make sure that G Suite is set up properly to accept/store those forms.
posted by pdb at 8:04 PM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]