“Analyzing Doctor-Doctor, Patient-Doctor, and Patient-Patient Social Networks” in Patent Application Approval Process (USPTO 20170185735)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Politics & Government Week -- A patent application by the inventors Appel, Ana P. (Sao Paulo, BR); Ito, Marcia (Sao Paulo, BR); Moyano, Luis G. (Rio de Janeiro, BR); Santana, Vagner F. (Sao Paulo, BR), filed on December 29, 2015, was made available online on July 6, 2017, according to news reporting originating from Washington, D.C., by VerticalNews correspondents.

This patent application has not been assigned to a company or institution.

The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: "The present invention relates to social networks, and more specifically, to a method, system and computer program product that utilizes transactional type health care data within various types of relationships or social networks (e.g., doctor-patient) in the health care industry and determines various patterns of data therefrom to support improved decision making based on the determined data patterns.

"Medical data inherently generated, stored e.g., in a cloud, and utilized in health care organizations is mostly transactional type data and includes data regarding, for example, doctor-patient consultations (e.g., diagnostic and treatment advice given by doctors to patients), patient claims filed and processed by health insurers, prescriptions written by doctors and filled by pharmacies, exams (e.g., X-Rays, Mills) provided by doctors and third parties, and other similar type events that routinely occur in the health care industry.

"More specifically, current health care insurance business intelligence practices focus mainly on aspects of individuals or groups of individuals of the same type. For example, a certain business intelligence process may analyze a particular type of physician or physicians (e.g., general practice providers, orthopedic surgeons, etc.) and provide statistics on that professional or professionals, median of number of patients, total amount charged to the health insurance company, etc.

"This approach is limited because the ecosystem formed by physicians, patients, and other stakeholders in the health care industry importantly includes the relationships among its elements. For instance, a relatively strong connection, relationship or link between a patient and a doctor most often is not taken into consideration, but should be taken into consideration, as this link may have a relatively strong economic impact to the health care insurance company, and it possibly goes undetected by current state-of-the-art business intelligence practices. As such, current business intelligence techniques only yield at best a partial view of important aspects of issues that are important to the health care industry.

"Thus, transactional type data is somewhat limited in its ability to support various analyses of the data based on different relationships or social networks within the health care industry, such as doctor-patient, doctor-doctor, and even patient-patient. Such data is also limited in its ability to allow for someone to extract or find relatively complex patterns that are present within the underlying data. This is not only the case for data related to health care organizations but is also true for the inherent data within other service type industries, such as the retail sales industry."

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent application, VerticalNews journalists also obtained the inventors' summary information for this patent application: "According to an embodiment of the present invention, a method includes selectively choosing data relating to one or more types of transactions to form selectively chosen data, and enriching the selectively chosen data with other data to form enriched data. The method also includes graph modeling the enriched data to form modeled graphs, discovering any patterns of metrics from within the modeled graphs, wherein the metrics relate to a relationship network between two or more people, and processing reports of the discovered patterns.

"According to another embodiment of the present invention, a system includes a processor in communication with one or more types of memory, the processor configured to selectively choose data relating to one or more types of transactions to form selectively chosen data, and enrich the selectively chosen data with other data to form enriched data. The processor is also configured to graph model the enriched data to form modeled graphs, discover any patterns of metrics from within the modeled graphs, wherein the metrics relate to a relationship network between two or more people, and process reports of the discovered patterns.

"According to yet another embodiment of the present invention, a computer program product includes a non-transitory storage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions for execution by the processing circuit for performing a method that includes selectively choosing data relating to one or more types of transactions to form selectively chosen data, and enriching the selectively chosen data with other data to form enriched data. The method also includes graph modeling the enriched data to form modeled graphs, discovering any patterns of metrics from within the modeled graphs, wherein the metrics relate to a relationship network between two or more people, and processing reports of the discovered patterns.

"Additional features and advantages are realized through the techniques of the present invention. Other embodiments and aspects of the invention are described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimed invention. For a better understanding of the invention with the advantages and the features, refer to the description and to the drawings."

URL and more information on this patent application, see: Appel, Ana P.; Ito, Marcia; Moyano, Luis G.; Santana, Vagner F. Analyzing Doctor-Doctor, Patient-Doctor, and Patient-Patient Social Networks. Filed December 29, 2015 and posted July 6, 2017. Patent URL: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220170185735%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20170185735&RS=DN/20170185735

Keywords for this news article include: Patents.

Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world. Copyright 2017, NewsRx LLC