Patent Application Titled “Use Of Cryptocurrency In Healthcare” Published Online (USPTO 20200380500)

2020 DEC 17 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- According to news reporting originating from Washington, D.C., by NewsRx journalists, a patent application by the inventor Dershem, Michael (Voorhees, NJ), filed on August 12, 2020, was made available online on December 3, 2020.

No assignee for this patent application has been made.

Reporters obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “Today there exist many ways for a patient to make payment to an individual healthcare provider from which the patient may have had services performed and for which a balance is due. This balance may be due because the patient has a balance after a third party (e.g. insurance company, Medicare, Medicaid) has made their portion of payment responsibility; or it could be a co-pay; or the patient has assumed all financial responsibility of services rendered by the healthcare provider (e.g. Doctor, hospital, clinic). These payments, called ‘patient-responsible portions of medical bills’ (PRPMB) can be made by check, credit card, debit card, money orders in person, via the mail, over the phone or over the internet. For the insurance carriers and government program payment providers, there already exists ‘clearing houses’ that provide mechanisms to aggregate payments to providers, but not such systems exists for aggregating PRPMBs for patients.

“There are many issues that exist in the current methods for paying the PRPMB. One such problem is that every provider must be paid directly for their own unique services rendered to the patient. For instance, many unique services are provided to a sick child when a responsible party takes the child to the local Emergency Room. After being triaged the child is seen by a physician contracted to the ER. The child might need to get x-rays. The child is then subsequently released after an overnight stay and sees the pediatrician for follow-up.

“After all of these and other services are rendered, the responsible party would then receive separate billing statements from each individual service provider requesting payment. After insurance pays its obligations to the individual providers, should the responsible party want to pay the PRPMB the individual providers online via a credit card, the patient would go on to the providers’ own websites or a separate payment page that is given on the patient’s billing statement. Often times the patient will need to set up an account through these individual entities’ websites. Once the time consuming activity of setting up the account is completed, the patient can then place their payment over the website and the payment is accepted. This transaction is processed by the merchant services provider of the unique medical provider. Thus, if this responsible party had seven different statements she would need to do this seven times, even though this may be the only and last time of any interaction with a particular medical provider.

“Other difficult issues exist in the healthcare industry, many surrounding the lack of uniform Practice Management Systems (PMS), which are the transactional systems that most of the industry uses to collect patient data and to submit claims. These are usually legacy systems that are utilized by nearly every healthcare provider and have a well-entrenched install base built on old DOS platforms and newer virtualization platforms. They do not interact, interface or communicate with each other and the disparate vendors that run and service them do not allow or even want this to happen. Other stakeholders such as insurance payers, healthcare institutions, and government entities rely on these systems, and/or information from these systems, but again these types of institutions do not allow others to use or even approach what they perceive as their data which might be gathered by these PMS.

“For decades, leaders of the healthcare industry and other various stakeholders have spoken at great length relative to the notion of achieving healthcare interoperability of PMS and other systems. In healthcare, interoperability is the ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate, exchange data, and use the information that has been exchanged. Data exchange schema and standards should permit data to be shared across clinicians, labs, hospitals, pharmacies, and patients regardless of the application or application vendor. Interoperability means the ability of health information systems to work together within and across organizational boundaries in order to advance the effective delivery of healthcare for individuals and communities. There are three levels of health information technology interoperability: 1) Foundational; 2) Structural; and 3) Semantic.

“Today the issues around interoperability go far beyond technical constraints, and they are also fraught with social, political, geographical, and business constraints. Without a forced government mandate, interoperability may not be achievable and the long felt need to use ‘big data’, the process of examining large and varied data sets to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful information that can help organizations make more-informed business decisions, in healthcare could not be possible.

“There is a need for systems, devices and methods to solve the aforementioned needs in the art, and other related needs. The art has not heretofore solved these problems.”

In addition to obtaining background information on this patent application, NewsRx editors also obtained the inventor’s summary information for this patent application: “The principles disclosed herein provide gateways for PRPMB transactions, regardless of the healthcare provider or merchant services (Credit card processing) provider. These principles provide uniform, consistent and secure devices, methods and systems that allow a patient to make PRPMB payments on one website or by one phone call or physical address regardless of the entity that is due payment, or when multiple entities are due payment.

“The present principles include, but are not limited to, a patient billing record which will be issued by an entity responsible for collecting from a patient amounts owed for healthcare services rendered to the patient comprising; a field indicating a provider of the healthcare services rendered by the provider to the patient, a field indicating the healthcare services rendered to the patient by the healthcare provider, a field indicating a date on which the healthcare services were rendered to the patient, a field indicating an amount paid for the services by an entity other than the patient, a field indicating a PRPMB which is remaining due after the amount paid for the services by an entity other than the patient, and a field providing a unique patient identifier which identifies the patient and allows an entity which collects the PRPMB to electronically identify the patient and that the patient owes the PRPMB.

“The present principles also include, but are not limited to, methods and gateways for allowing a patient to pay PRPMBs which are remaining due after an amount paid for healthcare services by an entity other than the patient; comprising; a processor configured to aggregate how many healthcare service providers must be paid a portion of the PRPMB that is associated with a bill that the patient receives and which are further uniquely identified with the patient through a unique patient identifier on the bill, and which will determine how the PRPMB is to be distributed if more than one healthcare service provider is due a portion of the PRPMB uniquely associated with the patient, and a processor configured to receive medical bill records associated with the healthcare service providers and for which PRPMB is due and to provide routing information to the gateway so that the PRPMB can be allocated amongst the healthcare service providers after the aggregator processor determines that PRPMB are due to healthcare service providers from patients with unique identifiers. The unique identifiers also provide an additional data field for data gathering to provide interoperability across networks. The use of cryptocurrencies is disclosed for making the processed payments.

“The present principles will be best understood by those with skill in the art by reading the following Detailed Description in conjunction with the drawings which are first described briefly below.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A method of creating a dynamic ledger for, comprising: gathering patient related data from a plurality of statements which identify patients with patients’ unique patient identifiers; creating unique internal identifiers for each of the patients having unique patient identifiers; determining whether the data gathered for each patient is sufficient for block chain transactions; when the gathered data is sufficient for block chain transactions, de-identifying each of the patient statements to remove data related to patient identity in the statements; and adding patient transactions and internal identifiers to a database, wherein the database is dynamically modifiable to accept new patient data when it is identified that new patients have statements that are capable of block chain transactions.

“2. The method of claim 2, further comprising consolidating separate, disparate patient identifying information which may exist across to create a self-directed patient identifier that the patient controls.

“3. The method of claim 2, further comprising contextualizing of the data to create contextual biomarkers which implement spatial and/or medical geography.

“4. The method of claim 3, further comprising providing access to patients of an enterprise stored value (ESV) in the block chain transaction to allow the patient to pay for medical services through the ESV.

“5. The method of claim 4, wherein the value of the ESV is a crypto-currency.

“6. The method of claim 5, wherein the crypto-currency is accessed through a virtual wallet and/or a unique credit card.

“7. The method of claim 6, further comprising authenticating the patient’s identity in the block chain transaction.

“8. A system for creating a dynamic ledger for, comprising: a memory; and a processor that is configured to receive data from the memory for processing, the processor being further configured to: gather patient related data from a plurality of statements which identify patients with patients’ unique patient identifiers; create unique internal identifiers for each of the patients having unique patient identifiers; determine whether the data gathered for each patient is sufficient for block chain transactions; when the gathered data is sufficient for block chain transactions, de-identify each of the patient statements to remove data related to patient identity in the statements; and add patient transactions and internal identifiers to a database, wherein the database is dynamically modifiable to accept new patient data when it is identified that new patients have statements that are capable of block chain transactions.

“9. The system of claim 8, wherein the processor is further configured to consolidate separate, disparate patient identifying information which may exist across to create a self-directed patient identifier that the patient controls.

“10. The system of claim 9, wherein the processor is further configured to contextualize the data to create contextual biomarkers which implement spatial and/or medical geography.

“11. The system of claim 10, wherein the processor is further configured to provide access to patients of an enterprise stored value (ESV) in the block chain transaction to allow the patient to pay for medical services through the ESV.

“12. The system of claim 11, wherein the value of the ESV is a crypto-currency.

“13. The system of claim 12, wherein the crypto-currency is accessed through a virtual wallet and/or a unique credit card.

“14. The system of claim 13, wherein the processor is further configured to authenticate the patient’s identity in the block chain transaction.

“15. A crypto-currency processor which is adapted to receive data from a memory concerning crypto-currencies and for creating a dynamic ledger for, comprising: an interface for communicating with the memory; and a processor that is configured to receive data from the memory for processing, the processor being further configured to: gather patient related data from a plurality of statements which identify patients with patients’ unique patient identifiers; create unique internal identifiers for each of the patients having unique patient identifiers; determine whether the data gathered for each patient is sufficient for block chain transactions; when the gathered data is sufficient for block chain transactions, de-identify each of the patient statements to remove data related to patient identity in the statements; and add patient transactions and internal identifiers to a database, wherein the database is dynamically modifiable to accept new patient data when it is identified that new patients have statements that are capable of block chain transactions.

“16. The system of claim 15, wherein the processor is further configured to consolidate separate, disparate patient identifying information which may exist across to create a self-directed patient identifier that the patient controls.

“17. The system of claim 16, wherein the processor is further configured to contextualize the data to create contextual biomarkers which implement spatial and/or medical geography.

“18. The system of claim 17, wherein the processor is further configured to provide access to patients of an enterprise stored value (ESV) in the block chain transaction to allow the patient to pay for medical services through the ESV.

“19. The system of claim 18, wherein the value of the ESV is a crypto-currency.

“20. The system of claim 19, wherein the processor is further configured to authenticate the patient’s identity in the block chain transaction.”

For more information, see this patent application: Dershem, Michael. Use Of Cryptocurrency In Healthcare. Filed August 12, 2020 and posted December 3, 2020. 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=%2220200380500%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20200380500&RS=DN/20200380500

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