Patent Application Titled “Selectively Redeemable Bundled Healthcare Services With Discreet Payment Distribution” Published Online (USPTO 20230222558): Mdsave Shared Services Inc.

2023 AUG 02 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at CDC & FDA Daily -- According to news reporting originating from Washington, D.C., by NewsRx journalists, a patent application by the inventors Aipperspach, Ryan (Brentwood, TN, US); Bischoff, Michael (Brentwood, TN, US); Kaufman, Mark (Brentwood, TN, US); Ketchel, III, Paul J. (Brentwood, TN, US); Martirosyan, Karen (Brentwood, TN, US); Osborne, Ani (Brentwood, TN, US); Schmidt, Daniel (Brentwood, TN, US), filed on January 9, 2023, was made available online on July 13, 2023.

The assignee for this patent application is Mdsave Shared Services Inc. (Brentwood, Tennessee, United States).

Reporters obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “Medical services are services provided to a medical patient. Some medical services may help improve or maintain a patient’s health, based on disease prevention, diagnosis, or treatment. The practice of medicine encompasses medical procedures performed for a patient, which may include both preventive care and treatment. Medical service providers include doctors, hospitals, and health insurers. A provider may offer medical services to patients by provisioning medical resources such as, for example, laboratory, imaging, treatment, or surgical facilities, to provide the services. Some medical services may require specially trained or licensed medical professionals. For example, a medical practice providing diagnosis and treatment for joint pain may provide medical services through the work of an orthopedic specialist. In some scenarios, patient access to a specialized professional or facility may be limited by cost, or availability. Some specialized medical professionals and related facilities may be scarce.

“A medical practice may also limit the medical procedures offered to patients based on the availability of specialized professionals and facilities at a given time or location as increasingly seen with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the services offered to a patient may be determined based on allocating surgeons to various surgical facility locations at specific times. Services supplied to patients may be limited to the allocated medical professionals and facilities, even when medical service demand exceeds supply at a given location or time. A medical practice providing many types of medical services may expend significant resources adapting the offered services to demand as cost and demand change. Some medical practices may fail to capture potential revenue lost when resources to provide medical services are underutilized relative to medical service demand.

“The price of healthcare services varies depending on specialty, procedure, and physician practice. In the United States, many patients do not have access to a simple way to shop and compare the price of common medical procedures. Due to the current managed care-based payor system in the US, the cost of treatment is often determined by managed care organizations.

“These managed care organizations have specific formularies for drugs and procedures designed specifically to patients’ individual health plans, which restrict the drugs and procedures available to patients in their plans. Patients have historically had no access to these price lists or formularies and have had very few tools to assist them in finding and comparing health care services or predetermining the cost of a procedure. Currently prospective patients who chose to compare medical costs are forced to conduct extensive, often inefficient, and time-consuming research to compare medical procedures prior to treatment.

“The rising cost of healthcare is having a dramatic effect on the U.S. healthcare system. Healthcare costs continue to outpace pace inflationary growth, provider reimbursement rates continue to fall, and the cost of patient insurance premiums are increasing. To lower monthly premium costs, many patients are choosing to purchase (and employers are choosing to offer) high deductible health plans as an alternative to traditional higher premium PPO health plans.

“These high deductible plans require patients to pay cash payments for medical services until the high deductible is satisfied, and once this deductible has been met, the insurance carrier begins to cover medical costs. As a result, many patients are seeing exponential increases in out-of-pocket expenses for medical procedures and services. In addition to more patients selecting high deductible plans, many patients cannot afford increased payments and are becoming uninsured or underinsured. As the number of patients who are uninsured, underinsured, or on high deductible plans grows, the need for a mechanism that allows patients to find discounted medical services increases and an efficient payment system.”

In addition to obtaining background information on this patent application, NewsRx editors also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent application: “Herein presented is an apparatus and associated methods for presenting users a selection of at least one bundled set of healthcare services provided discretely and/or individually by a plurality of respective providers, determining a bundle price for the bundled set of healthcare services, receiving payment for the user selected bundled set, generating a purchase data record hereafter interchangeably referred to as a “voucher” or “voucher data record” selectively redeemable by the user to receive each of the bundled healthcare services in the bundled set, transmitting a unique confirmation number generated for the voucher to track the redemption status of the voucher, disbursing payment allocated from the received payment to the plurality of respective providers and updating the redemption status of the voucher as each of the plurality of services of the bundled set are redeemed. The bundle price may be based on the user’s health insurance deductible as well as the location and/or time at which the bundled set of services will be provided.

“The above-described and other features and advantages realized through the techniques of the present disclosure will be better appreciated and understood with reference to the following detailed description, drawings, and appended claims. 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.

“The detailed description explains exemplary embodiments of the present invention, together with advantages and features, by way of example with reference to the drawings, in which similar numbers refer to similar parts throughout the drawings. The flow diagrams depicted herein are just examples. There may be many variations to these diagrams, or the steps (or operations) described therein without departing from the spirit of the invention. For instance, the steps may be performed in a differing order, or steps may be added, deleted, or modified. All these variations are considered to be within the scope of the claimed invention.

“Like reference symbols in the various drawings indicate like elements.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. An apparatus comprising: a processor; a user interface, operably coupled with the processor; and a memory that is not a transitory propagating signal, the memory configured to be operably coupled with the processor, and the memory comprising data and processor executable instructions to program and configure the processor to cause the apparatus to perform operations comprising: receive an electronic message comprising a selection of at least one bundled set of a plurality of selectively redeemable healthcare services to be provided by a plurality of respective providers, wherein the received selection is associated with a bundle price based on a location at which at least one selectively redeemable healthcare service of the bundled set of healthcare services will be provided; and in response to receiving the electronic message comprising the selection of the at least one bundled set of the plurality of selectively redeemable healthcare services, generate an electronic health record comprising a purchase data record for the selection identified by and with a unique confirmation number; preset an initial individual redemption status in the purchase data record for each selectively redeemable healthcare service of the at least one bundled set of healthcare services as unredeemed; and provide a user access to the purchase data record to receive each selectively redeemable healthcare service of the plurality of healthcare services of the at least one bundled set.

“2. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise receive an electronic message comprising payment in an amount of the bundle price for each of the at least one bundled set of healthcare services.

“3. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the received electronic message comprising payment further comprises an indication to finance the payment in the amount of the bundle price and the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise provide marketplace access to finance the payment.

“4. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise create at least one debt bundle comprising the amount of the bundle price for each of the at least one bundled set of healthcare services.

“5. The apparatus of claim 4, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise provide marketplace access to the at least one debt bundle to buy, sell, or trade the debt bundle.

“6. The apparatus of claim 4, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise send the at least one debt bundle to an asset exchange trading platform to buy, sell, or trade the debt bundle on the asset exchange trading platform.

“7. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the memory is operably coupled to the processor.

“8. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the memory is operably coupled to the processor, and wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise: in response to receiving the electronic message comprising the payment, store the electronic health record in the memory; and send the electronic health record to at least one provider of the plurality of respective providers.

“9. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise send the unique confirmation number to the user.

“10. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the received payment comprises real currency.

“11. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the received payment comprises cryptocurrency.

“12. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the received payment comprises virtual funds.

“13. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the received payment comprises electronic banking options.

“14. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the received payment further comprises promotional credit.

“15. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the received payment further comprises at least one virtual card.

“16. The apparatus of claim 15, wherein the at least one virtual card comprises a substitute card number.

“17. The apparatus of claim 15, wherein the at least one virtual card comprises a temporary card number.

“18. The apparatus of claim 15, wherein the at least one virtual card comprises a one-time authorization in an amount of the bundle price.

“19. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise disburse payment to at least one of the plurality of respective providers.

“20. The apparatus of claim 19, wherein the at least one of the plurality of respective providers to which payment is disbursed further comprises at least one of a physician, a practice group, a hospital or an insurer.

“21. The apparatus of claim 20, wherein the disbursed payment comprises real currency or virtual funds.

“22. The apparatus of claim 19, wherein the disbursed payment comprises a plurality of payments allocated by the processor from the received payment, wherein the plurality of payments is disbursed by the processor to each of the plurality of respective providers.

“23. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein the user has a health insurance policy having a health insurance deductible and wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise apply an amount of the received payment to the health insurance deductible.

“24. The apparatus of claim 23, wherein the amount of the received payment applied to the health insurance deductible is determined by the processor as a function of the health insurance policy.

“25. The apparatus of claim 23, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise set the bundle price based on the health insurance deductible.

“26. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the purchase data record persists in a data store operably coupled with the processor and wherein the purchase data record is redeemable using the processor until each of the plurality of healthcare services in the bundled set is redeemed.

“27. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the purchase data record is the electronic health record.

“28. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise receive a request for redemption of at least one healthcare service and using the purchase data record confirmation number to selectively determine the redemption status of the at least one healthcare service.

“29. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the operations performed by the apparatus further comprise update the redemption status of the purchase data record to indicate redemption of at least one of the plurality of healthcare services.

“30. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the at least one bundled set further comprises a drug.”

For more information, see this patent application: Aipperspach, Ryan; Bischoff, Michael; Kaufman, Mark; Ketchel, III, Paul J.; Martirosyan, Karen; Osborne, Ani; Schmidt, Daniel. Selectively Redeemable Bundled Healthcare Services With Discreet Payment Distribution. U.S. Patent Application Number 20230222558, filed January 9, 2023 and posted July 13, 2023. Patent URL (for desktop use only): https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/external.html?q=(20230222558)&db=US-PGPUB&type=ids

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