Patent Issued for System and method for facilitating patient discharge with the aid of a digital computer (USPTO 11049607)

2021 JUL 15 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Health Care Solutions Inc. (Kirkland, Washington, United States) has been issued patent number 11049607, according to news reporting originating out of Alexandria, Virginia, by NewsRx editors.

The patent’s inventors are Nikitin, Michael Anatolyevich (Kirkland, WA, US), Paraschiv, Iulian Vladimirovich (Kirkland, WA, US).

This patent was filed on May 2, 2018 and was published online on June 29, 2021.

From the background information supplied by the inventors, news correspondents obtained the following quote: “While healthcare facilities such as hospitals offer the highest quality of a patient care, a patient generally does not stay in such a facility for an extended period of time, and eventually must be discharged. Depending on the condition of the patient, the patient may not be discharged to his or her home, and instead require admission to a long-term care facility (“LTCF”), such as a nursing home, a licensed residential care home (adult family/foster home), a skilled nursing facility, or an assisted living facility.

“Currently, once the discharge date of a patient is known, the patient or a representative of the patient, such as a relative or a placement agent in a hospital, must engage in a manual search of a suitable LTCF. Generally, the patient and the patient’s representative are given a stack of brochures and verbal instructions about different options. However, the patient and any representative are often under a high level of stress and neither retain a significant amount of the given instructions nor find such brochures useful.

“As a result, left without a better option, the patient or the patient’s representative is forced to call over the phone a large number of LTCFs in the patient’s geographic area to learn availability and types of care provided in those facilities. If an LTCF has availability and provides care close to what the patient needs, the patient or the representative may visit facility in person for a tour. Such placement efforts typically takes weeks, sometimes extending to months, and such efforts may not even start until a qualified medical professional conducts an assessment of the patient necessary for the discharge. During this time, the patient generally resides in the original facility, experiencing a now-mismatched level of care, as well as confusion, stress, and possible cycles of hospital discharges and readmissions. Residing at the original facility, such as an acute care hospital, is further associated with higher costs to the hospital or to the patient than the patient would be burdened with at a suitable LTCF.

“Patient discharge is further complicated due to a lack of communication between different facilities involved in the discharge, such as a hospital and an LTCF. Due to a high level of patient privacy requirements imposed by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as other similar legislations, the facilities may be unable to directly share patient data with another organization. As a result, the patient representative may be forced to physically carry the necessary documentation from one facility to another.

“Accordingly, there is a need for a secure system that allows to identify a suitable facility for a patient’s discharge. There is a further need for a way to provide critical information in real time about care facility availability and type of care such facilities can provide. There is a still further need for caregivers and sometimes the patients themselves to be able to access a system where important information can be securely sent to and received from medical providers.”

Supplementing the background information on this patent, NewsRx reporters also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “The technical and administrative difficulties as well as the long-delays associated with a conventional discharge to a long-term care facility are remedied through a system and method described below. Data from a plurality of parties involved in a discharge of the patient is securely processed in a cloud-computing environment. The cloud-computing environment identifies long-term care facilities suitable for the patient using a plurality of matching criteria derived at least in part from discharge information provided by the facility from which the patient is being, contacts the long-term care facilities to determine whether the facilities would be interested to conducting a tour for the patient’s representative (and, or alternatively, the patient), and helps facilitate scheduling of the tour. The cloud-computing environment can further identify assessors capable of conducting the medical assessment of the patient and schedule the assessment, providing the assessment to all long-term care facilities that indicated willingness to conduct the tour. The cloud-computing environment securely stores the data received from all parties, protecting patient information in accordance with relevant laws, and can provide access to such information to authorized parties in near-real-time. The cloud-computing environment also verifies relevant licensing status of parties involved in the discharge to further preserve patient safety.

“In one embodiment, a system and method for facilitating a patient discharge with the aid of a digital computer is provided. Information regarding a plurality of long-term care facilities and a plurality of assessors capable of performing patient medical assessments is obtained by one or more of a plurality of servers within a cloud-computing environment information, the long-term care facilities information comprising a geographic location of the long-term care facilities and care capabilities of the long-term care facilities. Discharge information for a patient is received via one of a plurality of Internetworks by one or more of the servers from a user device associated with a discharging facility, the discharge information including care needs of the patient and geographic preferences of the patient for being discharged to one of the long-term care facilities. The long-term care facility information is compared by one or more of the servers to the received discharge information and one or more of the long-term care facilities suitable for the patient are identified by the one or more servers based on the comparison. One or more requests to indicate an interest of each of the identified long-term care facility is sent by one or more of the servers to one or more user devices associated with the identified long-term care facilities via one or more of the Internetworks. A response to the request from at least one of the long-term care facilities is received by one or more of the servers via one or more of the Internetworks. A medical assessment of the patient performed by one of the assessors is provided by one or more of the servers to one or more of the user devices associated with the responding long-term care facilities. A selection of one of the responding long-term care is received by one or more of the servers from a user associated with the discharging facility, wherein the patient is discharged to the selected long-term care facility following receipt of the assessment by that long-term health care facility.

“Still other embodiments of the present invention will become readily apparent to those skilled in the art from the following detailed description, wherein is described embodiments of the invention by way of illustrating the best mode contemplated for carrying out the invention. As will be realized, the invention is capable of other and different embodiments and its several details are capable of modifications in various obvious respects, all without departing from the spirit and the scope of the present invention. Accordingly, the drawings and detailed description are to be regarded as illustrative in nature and not as restrictive.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A method for facilitating a patient discharge with aid of a digital computer, comprising: obtaining, by one or more of a plurality of background process servers comprised within a cloud-computing environment, information regarding a plurality of long-term care facilities located in multiple states and a plurality of assessors capable of performing patient medical assessments, the long-term care facilities information comprising a geographic location of each of the long-term care facilities within one of the multiple states and care capabilities of the long-term care facilities; receiving, via one of a plurality of Internetworks, by a load balancing service comprised within the cloud-computing environment and implemented by one or more servers, from a user device associated with one of a plurality of discharging facilities, each discharging facility located in one of the multiple states, encrypted discharge information for one of a plurality of patients, each patient located in one of the multiple states, the discharge information comprising care needs of the patient and geographic preferences of the patient for being discharged to one of the long-term care facilities; providing, by the load balancing service, the received discharge information to one of a plurality of web servers comprised within the cloud computing environment, and assigning, by the load balancing service, to the one of the plurality of web servers to perform encrypted communication with the user device that provided the encrypted discharge information, wherein the web servers and the background process servers communicate via a message queuing service comprised within the cloud computing environment, and wherein the web server stores session data regarding the encrypted communication and keys used for the encrypted communication within the cloud-computing environment; obtaining by one or more of the background process servers an up-to-date availability of placement spots in the long-term care facilities and adding the up-to-date availability of the placement spots to the long-term care facilities information, comprising interfacing, via one or more of the Internetworks, patient management tools software associated with each of the long-term care facilities, determining a number of long-term care facility patients being tracked by the patient management tools software associated with each of the long-term care facilities, and setting the number of the long-term care facility patients being tracked by patient management tools software associated with each of the long-term care facilities as a number of the long-term care facility patients currently in those long-term care facilities, wherein the patient management tools software are executing outside of the cloud-computing environment; comparing, by the web server, the long-term care facility information to matching criteria, the matching criteria comprising a set of criteria comprising the received discharge information and a requirement for the placement spots being available; identifying, by the web server, one or more of the long-term care facilities suitable for the patient based on the comparison; sending, by one or more of the background process servers, to one or more user devices associated with each of the identified long-term care facilities, using one or more external APIs, via one or more of the Internetworks, one or more requests to indicate an interest of each respective long-term care facility in admitting the patient; receiving, by one or more of the background process servers, via one or more of the Internetworks, a response to the request from at least one of the long-term care facilities; causing at least in part the patient to be discharged to one of the responding long-term care facilities by one or more of the web servers comprising providing a patient medical assessment of the patient performed by one of the assessors to one or more of the user devices associated with the responding long-term care facilities; receiving, by the web server, via one or more of the Internetworks, from the user device associated with the discharging facility, a selection of one of the long-term care facilities that provided the; and receiving by one or more of the web servers from one of the user devices associated with the selected long-term care facility a confirmation that the patient has been discharged to the selected long-term care facility.

“2. A method according to claim 1, further comprising two or more of: delivering one of the requests to cellular phones associated with each of the long-term care facilities; upon not receiving the responses from one or more of the cellular phones during a time period, leaving a voice message in a mailbox associated with the cellular phones that have not responded; sending one of the requests to faxes associated with each of the long-term care facilities from whom the response has not been received; and upon not receiving the responses from one or more of the long-term care facilities associated with the faxes following an additional time period, delivering one of the requests to a landline phone number associated with each of the long-term care facilities that have not provided the response following the sending of the requests to the faxes.

“3. A method according to claim 1, further comprising: retrieving, by one or more of the background process servers, from one or more servers associated with a government agency, government data associated with each of the plurality of long-term care facilities, the government data comprising licensing information of each of the long-term care facilities, an identifier of each of the long-term care facilities, an availability of openings within each of the long-term care facilities, and contact information of each of the long-term care facilities; registering by one or more of the background servers at least one of the one or more of the long-term care facilities, comprising: contacting the at least one long-term care facility with an invitation to provide registration information, the registration information comprising the identifier of the contacted long-term care facility; and receiving the registration information from the contacted long-term care facility; verifying a licensing status of the contacted long-term care facility using the licensing information and the identifier; providing a verification code to the contact information comprised within the government data; and receiving the verification code from the at least one long-term care facility, wherein the registration is completed following receipt of the verification code.

“4. A method according to claim 3, wherein the registration information further comprises a total number of the placement spots within the contacted long-term care facility, obtaining the up-to-date availability of the placement spots in the long-term care facilities further comprising: subtracting the number of the long-term care facility patients currently in each of the long-term care facilities from the total number of the placement spots in the same long-term care facility; and setting a result of subtraction for each of the long-term care facilities as a number of available placement spots within the same long-term care facility.

“5. A method according to claim 1, further comprising: setting the matching criteria, wherein the geographic preferences comprise a geographic range from a location associated with the patient; upon none of the long-term care facilities satisfying the matching criteria, modifying the matching criteria by increasing the geographic range, comparing the increased geographic range to a threshold, and upon the increased geographic range being below the threshold, comparing the long-term care facility information and the availability of the placement spots at the long-term care facilities to the modified matching criteria; and upon the increased geographic range being above the threshold, changing the matching criteria by removing the requirement for the placement spots being available from the set, decreasing the increased geographic range, and comparing the long-term care facility information to the changed matching criteria.

“6. A method according to claim 1, wherein the set of the criteria further comprises an availability of placement spots within each of the long-term care facilities and whether each of the long-term care facilities have been registered with the cloud-computing environment.

“7. A method according to claim 1, wherein the assessor information comprises geographic ranges within which each of the assessors perform the assessments and temporal availability of the assessors to perform the assessments, further comprising: receiving assessor matching criteria comprising a temporal interval for the assessment and a location of the patient; comparing the assessor information for the plurality of the assessors to the assessor matching criteria and identifying those of the assessors suitable for performing the assessment of the patient based on the comparison; contacting the identified assessors with a request to perform the assessment; receiving an acceptance of the request to perform the assessment from one of the assessors and providing the discharge information to the assessor that accepted the request; notifying the remaining identified assessors of the acceptance; and receiving the assessment from the one assessor.

“8. A method according to claim 7, wherein the one assessor receives the discharge information via at least one of a mobile application and a web-browser executing on a mobile device of the one assessor.

“9. A method according to claim 1, further comprising: scheduling a tour of the selected long-term care facility, wherein the patient is discharged to the selected long-term care facility after the tour.”

There are additional claims. Please visit full patent to read further.

For the URL and additional information on this patent, see: Nikitin, Michael Anatolyevich. System and method for facilitating patient discharge with the aid of a digital computer. U.S. Patent Number 11049607, filed May 2, 2018, and published online on June 29, 2021. 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=11049607.PN.&OS=PN/11049607RS=PN/11049607

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