… So I’ve decided to dip my toes into some web automation.

My problem is that my mental health therapist doesn’t accept my insurance because they’re out of network. My insurance will reimburse a partial amount of my therapy bill if I submit a claim with a super-bill from my therapist. I really want my money back, but it’s a huge bummer to have to fill out a claims form every month – and honestly depression makes tasks like this very difficult.

So I want to have a script that uploads it for me.

Automating interacting with my insurance company’s website is in violation of their terms of use, so this is all very hypothetical

So let’s break down this problem. Here’s what I do when I complete this process manually

1. My therapist emails me my superbill
2. I download the superbill as a pdf and name it something like “Superbill_MAY2023”
3. I log in to my insurance company’s website
4. I navigate to their claims page
5. I fill out the form. Some of the info is on the pdf, and some of it is the same each time I fill out the form
6. I upload my superbill for that month
7. I submit my form

I want to do this automatically. There are three systems I see interacting

1. My pdf has to be downloaded to my local system from my email
2. My local system needs to parse some data from the pdf and store it somewhere
3. My system them needs to login to the insurance company’s website and fill in the form with the info from the pdf

I think I can use either some built-in stuff from gmail or google scripts to get the pdf to automatically download. I’m thinking I’ll then use python to extract the necessary data from the pdf. I’m not too sure how I’ll get the form to autofill, but I’ll probably use some javascript for that.

I’m going to start with the easiest part I can think of – automatic download of gmail attachments from a certain sender. 

We’ll see how I do that in the next post!