Adaptive communication methods and systems for facilitating the gathering, distribution and delivery of information related to medical care
First Claim
1. A machine-implemented method for notifying at least one care-concerned person such as a medical service provider or a medical assistant to a health or medical care-related situation constituted by at least one of the following notification worthy situations:
- (0.1) completion of a care-related task where said task completion calls for relatively prompt attention thereto;
(0.2) in-completion of a care-related communication delivery-attempt where said in-completion of the delivery-attempt calls for relatively prompt attention thereto;
(0.3) in-completion of a care-related task where said in-completion of the care-related task calls for relatively prompt attention thereto;
(0.4) an unexpected change or a lack of expected change in a medical condition of a given patient where said unexpected change or lack of expected change calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; and
(0.5) an apparent failure to notify a primary medical service provider, or a primary medical assistant as may be appropriate, of one of the above notification-worthy situations;
where said machine-implemented alerting method comprises;
(a) monitoring communications related to progress or lack of progress in timely completion of pre-scheduled, care-related tasks and related to timely completion of pre-scheduled, care-related communication delivery-attempts and related to medical conditions of respective ones of plural patients;
(b) identifying among the monitored communications those which are indicative of at least one of said care-related situations that call for relatively prompt attention thereto by a care-concerned person such as the medical service provider and the medical assistant, where criteria for determining whether or not a given situation is one that calls for relatively prompt attention thereto are machine-defined and where timeliness of pre-scheduled ones of said care-related tasks and care-related communication delivery-attempts are machine-defined; and
(c) for an identified one of the monitored communications which is indicative of at least one of said care-related situations that call for relatively prompt attention thereto, initiating a delivery-attempt for delivering to at least one targeted recipient in a group comprised of said medical service provider and medical assistant an alert signal for notifying the targeted recipient of the monitored and identified communication.
5 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
Automated methods and systems are disclosed for persistently facilitating the timely gathering, monitoring, distribution and delivery of information related to medical care where such may include: (1) finding a communications channel for effectively attempting a message delivery to a specific target person at a specified time; (2) deliverable message content to limitations of a chosen communications channel; adaptively finding a targeted recipient even if the latter is highly mobile and/or has travel patterns or communications-channel preferences that change over time; (3) verifying that a targeted recipient has actually received an attempted delivery within an applicable time limit; (4) automatically recognizing that an urgent message delivery-attempt was not timely completed and adaptively alerting responsible entities of the in completion; and (5) automatically recognizing that an urgent change or non change of condition has occurred by virtue of information gathered during an automated or manually-conducted Interview where physician expected positive progress prior to Interview and adaptively alerting responsible entities of the changed or unchanged condition based on the urgency of the change or non-change.
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Citations
17 Claims
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1. A machine-implemented method for notifying at least one care-concerned person such as a medical service provider or a medical assistant to a health or medical care-related situation constituted by at least one of the following notification worthy situations:
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(0.1) completion of a care-related task where said task completion calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; (0.2) in-completion of a care-related communication delivery-attempt where said in-completion of the delivery-attempt calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; (0.3) in-completion of a care-related task where said in-completion of the care-related task calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; (0.4) an unexpected change or a lack of expected change in a medical condition of a given patient where said unexpected change or lack of expected change calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; and (0.5) an apparent failure to notify a primary medical service provider, or a primary medical assistant as may be appropriate, of one of the above notification-worthy situations; where said machine-implemented alerting method comprises; (a) monitoring communications related to progress or lack of progress in timely completion of pre-scheduled, care-related tasks and related to timely completion of pre-scheduled, care-related communication delivery-attempts and related to medical conditions of respective ones of plural patients; (b) identifying among the monitored communications those which are indicative of at least one of said care-related situations that call for relatively prompt attention thereto by a care-concerned person such as the medical service provider and the medical assistant, where criteria for determining whether or not a given situation is one that calls for relatively prompt attention thereto are machine-defined and where timeliness of pre-scheduled ones of said care-related tasks and care-related communication delivery-attempts are machine-defined; and (c) for an identified one of the monitored communications which is indicative of at least one of said care-related situations that call for relatively prompt attention thereto, initiating a delivery-attempt for delivering to at least one targeted recipient in a group comprised of said medical service provider and medical assistant an alert signal for notifying the targeted recipient of the monitored and identified communication.
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2. An alerting mechanism for summarily alerting a care-concerned person such as a medical service provider or a medical assistant to a care-related situation constituted by at least one of the following situations:
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(0.1) completion of a care-related task where said task completion calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; (0.2) in-completion of a care-related communication delivery-attempt where said in-completion of the delivery-attempt calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; (0.3) in-completion of a care-related task where said in-completion of the care-related task calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; and (0.4) an unexpected change or a lack of expected change in a medical condition of a given patient where said unexpected change or lack of expected change calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; where said alerting mechanism comprises; (a) action requesting means far advising the care-concerned person of an attention-giving action that is to be provided by the care-concerned person or delegated to another care-concerned person in response to an alerted situation; (b) topic defining means for advising the care-concerned person of the medical concern that is addressed by the alerted situation; (c) patient identifying means for advising the care-concerned person of the identity of one or more patients associated with a corresponding attention-giving action and a corresponding medical concern that is addressed by the alerted situation; and (d) situation identifying means for advising the care-concerned person of a situation type to which the alerted situation belongs. - View Dependent Claims (3, 4, 5)
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6. A follow-up scheduling and monitoring mechanism for automatically assisting a care-concerned person such as a medical service provider or a medical assistant in scheduling one or more health or medical care follow up actions following a first care-related situation constituted by at least one of the following situations:
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(0.1) completion of a first examination where an initial assessment of patient condition was made and one or more follow up medical tests were ordered; (0.2) in-completion of a care-related communication delivery-attempt where said in-completion of the delivery-attempt calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; (0.3) in-completion of a care-related task where said in-completion of the care-related task calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; and (0.4) an unexpected change or a lack of expected change in a medical condition of a given patient where said unexpected change or lack of expected change calls for relatively prompt attention thereto; where said follow-up scheduling and monitoring mechanism comprises; (a) adaptive scheduling means for adaptively scheduling one or more attention-giving, follow up actions that are to be provided chronologically in response to the first care-related situation; and (b) patient attribute defining means for defining one or more health-related attributes of the under-care patient which can affect the carrying out of said, one or more attention-giving, follow up actions that are to be provided.
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7. In a machine-implemented, communications managing and delivering system having at least one of:
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(0.1) filtering means for automatically identifying intervention-worthy communications which are worthy of being reviewed by a human intervener; and (0.2) task in-completion detecting means for automatically detecting note-worthy failures to complete attempted communications and/or note-worthy failures to complete scheduled action items; where the communications managing and delivering system further includes an alert generating means for generating alert reports indicative of at least one category of said intervention-worthy communications, note-worthy failures to complete attempted communications, and note-worthy failures to complete scheduled action items; an alerts summarizing mechanism comprising; (a) prioritizing means for prioritizing alert reports according to their comparative intervention-worthinesses. or note-worthinesses, where said comparative worthiness characteristics are machine-defined; and (b) target-person identifying means for identifying a target-person to whom one of said intervention-worthy communications is to be sent, or on whose behalf a note-worthy failure to complete an attempted communication occurred, or on whose behalf a note-worthy failure to complete a scheduled action item occurred. - View Dependent Claims (8, 9, 10)
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11. A machine-implemented, communications formulating, managing and delivering system comprising:
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(a) interview formulation assisting means for assisting a user in formulating an interview that is to be delivered to one or more targeted persons; (b) interview delivery scheduling means for scheduling time ranges in which attempts will be made to deliver one or more formulated interviews; and (c) interview completion checking means for checking that a scheduled interview was timely conducted, or if not, for alerting a responsible person of the in-completion of the scheduled interview.
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12. An adaptive dialog conducting mechanism for use in a communications managing and delivering system where the communications managing and delivering system stores attributes describing potential target persons to whom communications may be sent;
- and where
said adaptive dialog conducting mechanism comprises; (a) a decision tree having one or more dialog flow paths that are to be followed during automated carrying out of the adaptive dialog, where the one or more dialog flow paths that are followed can be selected in real time response answers or lack of answers provided by the communication target person; and (b) a presentable data section for storing content-variable data that is to be presented at respective nodes of the decision tree, where the content-variable data may be generated in response to personal attributes of the communication target person. - View Dependent Claims (13)
- and where
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14. A machine-implemented, communications delivering and response collecting system comprising:
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(a) interview conducting means for delivering an interview through a communications channel to a target person and for collecting data representative of responses or non-responses by the target person to the delivered interview; and (b) alert generating means for analyzing said responses or non-responses by the target person to the delivered interview and for selectively generating an alert signal in accordance with alert rules provided within the system.
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15. A machine-implemented, communications delivering system comprising:
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(a) a plurality of channel managers each for managing delivery of one or more interviews through a manager-specific communications channel; and (b) a delivery scheduler operatively coupled to the plural channel managers for delegating delivery-attempt responsibilities for specific messages to respective subsets of the plural channel managers and for undoing respective ones of said delegations when one of the channel managers succeeds in delivering a respective one of the specific messages.
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16. A scalable machine-implemented, communications delivering and response collecting system comprising:
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(a) an application server for processing respective data communications under pre-assigned service-organization designations (applications); and (b) a database for storing; (b.
1) respective, communication processing rules of respective ones of said pre-assigned service-organization designations; and(b.2) persons records defining person attributes of respective persons who can have service-providing and/or service receiving roles under each of said service-organization designations.
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17. For use in a service providing organization, a machine-implemented method for increasing likelihood that service-related communications will be delivered to and retrieved by communications-targeted persons, said machine-implemented method comprising:
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(a) adaptively defining multi-channel delivery strategies over time for potential, communications-targeted persons based on previous delivery-attempt histories so as to increasing likelihood of delivery success to specific ones of said potential, communications-targeted persons when a next communication is targeted to one or more of such potential, communications targeted persons; (b) requesting confirmation by communications-targeted persons of receipt and understanding of delivered ones of said communications; and (c) if failed delivery-attempts exceed predefined thresholds or communications-targeted persons fail to confirm receipt and understanding of delivered ones of said communications within predefined time limits, routing alerts to responsible persons within the service providing organization asking them to respond to the failed communications attempts.
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Specification