A Mirth Connect Privacy Plugin

This plugin for Mirth Connect performs two functions to prevent exposing details of your server and Personal Data to NextGen Healthcare.

First, it disables the collection of server and client statistics. There is a checkbox in the server settings which allows you to opt-out of this data collection. However, it defaults to being on, and there is typically no way to prevent the initial sending of this data the first time spinning up a new server. The plugin turns this option off before the first time the server performs the check to see whether to send or not.

Second, it bypasses the first time login screen. While previous versions of Mirth allowed you to skip registration and filling out the form, as of version 4.1.0 it will not let you proceed without filling out the form and submitting it to NextGen. Although there is a checkbox to opt-out of receiving email communication from NextGen, the application still will not allow you past this form without every field populated. This is an immense burden for developers during testing when new server instances are frequently created and thrown away. Ironically, this intrusive behavior is touted as a new feature.

The plugin accomplishes this by simply setting the firstlogin flag to false for user 1 (admin) which is normally set by the application after completing the first login process. Be aware that the software will no longer prompt you to change your password, which is typically not an issue for development servers with a short lifespan for which this plugin is intented to be used.

This repository is based on this excellent sample project.

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Build Instruction

1. Install Java
2. Install Maven
3. Run git clone https://github.com/tonygermano/mirth-privacy-plugin
4. Navigate to mirth-privacy-plugin/
5. Run mvn install to install dependencies to local cache
6. Run mvn clean package to verify the build works
7. Get the .zip archive from distribution/target

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Installation

Due to the nature of this plugin it has little use if installed by normal means through the Administrator Client. Installation therefore depends on how you are running mirth.

• For a typical installation using either the installer or compressed archives available for download from NextGen's website, you should unzip the contents of the .zip archive to the extensions directory in your Mirth installation directory.
• If running a container based on the NextGen docker image, the extension can be included by:
  1. Mounting the .zip archive into the container in the /opt/connect/custom-extensions directory.
  2. Nest the .zip archive within another .zip archive containing all additonal extensions you would like to run, and then set the EXTENSIONS_DOWNLOAD environment variable to point to a URL at which you are hosting the file which will be downloaded and extracted at startup.

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License

Copyright 2021 Kaur Palang
Copyright 2022 Tony Germano

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.