Patent Issued for Managing Patient Bed Assignments And Bed Occupancy In A Health Care Facility (USPTO 10,482,555)

2019 NOV 28 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- From Alexandria, Virginia, NewsRx journalists report that a patent by the inventors Rosow, Eric (Avon, CT); Adam, Joe (West Hartford, CT); Roth, Chris (West Hartford, CT), filed on May 27, 2011, was published online on December 2, 2019.

The patent’s assignee for patent number 10,482,555 is Allscripts Software LLC.

News editors obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “Most hospitals employ an Admission/Discharge/Transfer (ADT) system for managing ancillary information, such as admissions, discharge and transfer data about its patients. However, there are existing problems in ADT systems. One problem, for example, is the inability of current ADT systems to provide sufficient clinical information for appropriate patient placement.

“Another problem area is the lack of accurate bed availability information. This generally results in lost admissions and excessive wait times.

“Inefficient communication while searching for the appropriate bed for a patient, is another problem.

“High incidences of `observation` outpatients that occupy inpatient beds without payer authorization, is another problem.

“Additionally, current ADT systems often lack the ability to access and provide meaningful historical, current and predictive data regarding bed occupancy levels and other activities and events related to the operation of a health care facility.”

As a supplement to the background information on this patent, NewsRx correspondents also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “The present invention satisfies, to a great extent, the foregoing and other needs not currently satisfied by existing systems. This result is achieved, in an exemplary embodiment, by providing an integrated health care delivery network with enabling technology to maximize bed resources, manage varying census levels, and avoid patient diversions through real-time monitoring, automation and communication.

“Preferably, the present invention is embodied in a bed management system that interfaces with and complements existing health care facilities admission systems such as Admission/Discharge/Transfer (ADT) systems. The bed management system is an easy-to-use intelligent application that is designed to allow administrators, clinicians and managers to easily access, analyze and display real-time patient and bed availability and related information from ancillary information systems, databases and spreadsheets. In other words, it enables users to see trends and relationships in hospital management data directly from their desktop personal computers and/or handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs).

“The present invention improves patient placement efficiency and saves time and money by assisting with the clinical and business decision process that occurs when a patient needs to be admitted to a hospital, for instance. The system includes the use of virtual instruments to provide a cross-functional view of enterprise status throughout a facility or organization. Decision makers can easily move from big-picture analyses to transaction-level details while, at the same time, safely sharing this information throughout the enterprise to derive knowledge and make timely, data-driven decisions.

“The system of the present invention enables more efficient patient placement by, for example, reducing/eliminating telephone calls and paper processes, and automatically matching patient requirements to available resources. In addition, it is an extremely powerful data warehouse and data mining tool that provides on-demand historical, real-time and predictive reports, alerts and recommendations.

“The system of the present invention is real-time and mission critical. That is, it handles both scheduled and emergency events. The system also assists with the clinical and business decision processes that occur when a patient needs to be assigned to a specific bed location, for example.

“Collectively, the system provides organizations or enterprises with an array of enabling technologies to: schedule/reserve/request patient bed assignments; assign/transfer patients from an emergency department and/or other clinical areas; reduce/eliminate dependency on telephone calls to communicate patient and bed requirements; apply statistical process control (SPC) and ‘Six Sigma’ methodologies to manage occupancy and patient diversion; and provide administrators, managers and caregivers with accurate and on-demand reports and automatic alerts such as through pagers, electronic mail, telephone and intelligent software agents.

“Other features of the present invention include: easy-to-use visual navigation; intuitive interactive interface; easy queries; runs on standard computers; real-time, historical and predictive analyses; user configurable settings; remote access and control; geographical information system interfaces; text-to-speech conversion; interactive agent support and alarms; automatic messaging via email, pagers, telephone, etc.; integrated online help; file management and configuration utilities. In addition to these features, the present invention bed management system is designed to protect patient confidentiality and be fully compliant with the evolving Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. A full security system is embedded within the dashboard to authenticate users, audit user access and assign users to definable system roles. These roles restrict both processes and the ability to view or change key data.

“With these and other advantages and features of the invention that may become hereinafter apparent, the nature of the invention may be more clearly understood by reference to the following detailed description of the invention and to the several drawings attached herein.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“What is claimed is:

“1. A system for data management, comprising: a computer configured to communicate with an admission/discharge/transfer (ADT) system associated with a health care facility to receive transactional messages; and a database operatively coupled to the computer, wherein the computer is configured to generate a plurality of icons in a pattern of a floor plan of the health care facility, each icon conveying a first level of information comprising at least one of patient bed occupancy and bed availability, wherein the computer is configured to parse the received transactional messages to extract components of the messages and continually update the generated icons based on the extracted components, wherein the computer is configured to generate a link to secondary information in response to interaction with the one or more icons, the secondary information comprising medical information associated with a respective patient occupying a respective bed associated with the icon, wherein the computer is configured to initiate intelligent agents to monitor the ADT system for predetermined data over a predetermined period of time, and wherein the computer is configured to graphically modify at least one of the plurality of icons in the pattern and generate supplementary data via the intelligent agents for the first level of information based on the monitored predetermined data and at least a portion of the predetermined period of time, wherein the supplementary data comprises one or more conditions of the health care facility associated with the first level of information.

“2. A method of operating a system for data management, comprising: receiving, via a computer, transactional messages from an admission/discharge/transfer (ADT) system associated with a health care facility; generating, via the computer, a plurality of icons in a pattern of a floor plan of the health care facility, each icon conveying a first level of information comprising at least one of patient bed occupancy and bed availability; parsing, via the computer, the received transactional messages to extract components of the messages and continually updating the generated icons based on the extracted components; generating, via the computer, a link to secondary information in response to interaction with the one or more icons, the secondary information comprising medical information associated with a respective patient occupying a respective bed associated with the icon; initiating, via the computer, intelligent agents to monitor the ADT system for predetermined data over a predetermined period of time; and graphically modifying, via the computer, at least one of the plurality of icons in the pattern and generating supplementary data via the intelligent agents for the first level of information based on the monitored predetermined data and at least a portion of the predetermined period of time, wherein the supplementary data comprises one or more conditions of the health care facility associated with the first level of information.”

For additional information on this patent, see: Rosow, Eric; Adam, Joe; Roth, Chris. Managing Patient Bed Assignments And Bed Occupancy In A Health Care Facility. U.S. Patent Number 10,482,555, filed May 27, 2011, and published online on December 2, 2019. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,482,555.PN.&OS=PN/10,482,555RS=PN/10,482,555

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