Patent Issued for System and method for scheduling patient appointments (USPTO 11282041): Yips LLC

2022 APR 13 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Yips LLC (Metairie, Louisiana, United States) has been issued patent number 11282041, according to news reporting originating out of Alexandria, Virginia, by NewsRx editors.

The patent’s inventors are Sanderford, Britton (New Orleans, LA, US), Sanderford, Shelby (New Orleans, LA, US).

This patent was filed on November 4, 2016 and was published online on March 22, 2022.

From the background information supplied by the inventors, news correspondents obtained the following quote: “Accuracy of scheduling of medical appointments is poor, requiring patients to wait for care both prior to an appointment and within one or more appointment states that make up the appointment. A common wait time of 1-2 hours results in lost income and loss of productivity by the patient. Patient satisfaction is influenced by patient exasperation due to excessive total wait time. The total wait time also results in inefficiencies in use of resources. Each appointment state does not have a fixed and certain repeatable order and duration. In a medical appointment, a medical practitioner or provider is required to offer all reasonable care. A provider may not choose to abbreviate an examination by deciding to forgo a consultation, a test, or a medical procedure. Therefore, it is challenging for a clinical office to remain on schedule after a first few appointments have occurred in the day. Scheduling of numerous medical appointments without compounding delays remains a vexing challenge.

“A typical doctor’s office will attempt to schedule 20-60 appointments in a day. Some doctors allocate a same amount of time for each appointment and simply stop making appointments after 3:00 PM because they know this means the last patient will be seen at 5:30 PM. Some providers will try and divide appointments into two time durations based on whether the patient is new or an existing one, or they may divide the appointment into multiple time durations based on the medical need of the patient. After the first few patient appointments, each individual uncertainty of time duration accumulates. This accumulation becomes significant over a large number of individual appointments, essentially compounding the error in the prediction of the appointment timing 20 or 25 times. This is quite different than the error that can be accumulated by two table turns and corrected by an abbreviated coffee service.

“There can be unscheduled emergency visits or regular visits that become emergencies. Further, a typical medical practitioner’s office employs the use of more than one patient examination room. If a doctor’s office has a typical number of four patient examination rooms, this means any one of those rooms can be in any aforementioned states, further adding to the complexity of prediction. A quick calculation of variability: Exam room states 3 to 5 x 0 to 2 loops x 3 to 15 minutes per state lower bound 9 minutes upper bound 150 minutes (2.5 hours). If the mean duration of an examination or occupancy of an exam room is 45 minutes, and if the status quo can estimate visit duration with 20% accuracy then the 25th patient will have to wait nearly 2 hours before being cared for.”

Supplementing the background information on this patent, NewsRx reporters also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “A scheduling system and methods for scheduling patient appointments disclosed here utilize any available input to identify a timestamp and a spatial location relating to a patient and/or one or more providers in proximity of one or more appointment locations, to allocate a set of procedure resources to each patient appointment based on the timestamps and the spatial locations, and to communicate any revised timing to the patient, thereby minimizing a total waiting time. The scheduling system allows for scheduling of appointments divided into multiple appointment states, each having a predicted timing. An appointment start time is based on a sum of the predicted timing for each appointment state in the schedule. After a completed appointment state, individual uncertainty of the predicted timing is replaced with an actual timing and the predicted timing of the remaining schedule is revised. This scheduling system enables adaptive reallocation of resources while avoiding compounding the waiting times that create a multi-state iterative and time-variant problem.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A method performed with a patient scheduling system by processing circuitry in a scheduling server located across a first connection to the Internet from a healthcare provider to forecast time of future scheduled patient appointments on the day of the scheduled patient appointment, the method comprising: obtaining security credentials for at least one commercial data base vendor of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) compliant confidential patient data, wherein after obtaining the security credentials from the commercial vendor, the scheduling server communicates across a second connection to the Internet to query an electronic medical record database of the at least one commercial data base vendor using the security credentials and accesses a security firewall at the at least one commercial vendor to obtain the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) compliant confidential patient data including prior patient medical information (PPMI) of third party patients; and constructing in the scheduling server located across the first public internet connection from the healthcare provider a temporally optimized ordered list of patient appointments which minimizes patient waiting time that day by using prior appointment duration data in the HIPAA compliant confidential patient data having been accessed through the security firewall at the at least one commercial data base vendor to predict an appointment duration from which a predicted start time is calculated; and wherein predicted appointment durations in the temporally optimized ordered list are calculated in the scheduling server based on the HIPAA compliant confidential patient data and the PPMI accessed through the second connection to the Internet and the security firewall and any previously recorded data, wherein, by using the programming interface and accessing HIPAA compliant confidential patient data and the PPMI through the security firewall and by having access to the previously recorded data, an accuracy for the future scheduled patient appointments for the patient scheduling system is increased, wherein the processing circuitry in the scheduling server of the patient scheduling system located across the first connection to the Internet from the healthcare provider and located across the second connection to the Internet from the at least one commercial database vendor executes a) summing the predicted appointment durations, b) estimating a start time for a patient appointment based on the sum of the predicted appointment durations, c) determining an actual duration of the patient appointment of a patient included in the ordered list, on the day of the appointment, d) upon determining the actual duration of the patient appointment, replacing the predicted appointment duration of a predicted appointment timing with the actual duration of the patient appointment, wherein the determining the actual duration utilizes a sensor and communication system for sensing proximity-time data of a patient, the sensor and communication system comprising plural sensing devices each having different spatial accuracy factors representing different spatial precisions between the plural sensing devices and networked in communication via the first connection to the Internet with the scheduling server, the sensing devices providing the proximity-time data of the patient and comprising at least 1) a mobile patient device networked to the scheduling server and located on the patient and which uses data messages for communication from the patient device through the scheduling server to a provider site of the patient included in the ordered list, 2) a provider device operated by a medical provider located at the provider site and networked to the scheduling server, and 3) a medical records database of the medical provider comprising patient check in or check out information and networked via the first connection to the Internet to the scheduling server, the sensor and communication system providing at least an indication of patient availability at the start time for the patient appointment and a completion time of the patient appointment and the scheduling server utilizing at least the spatial accuracy factors to rank a spatial accuracy of the sensing devices; e) based on the spatial accuracy factors and an availability of the proximity-time data of the patients from each of the sensors, ranking and selecting available outputs from the sensing devices, and determining from the available outputs of the sensing devices the actual duration of the patient appointment, f) upon replacing the predicted appointment duration with the actual duration, updating the predicted appointment timing for each other patient appointment in the ordered list to more accurately predict the start time of said each other patient appointment.

“2. The method according to claim 1, further comprising g) upon in the scheduling server updating the predicted appointment time for said each other patient appointment, notifying a list of patients if their time of check-in is changed, wherein notifying comprises communicating to the mobile patient device and causing a notification to display on a display of the mobile patient device of the changed check-in, wherein updating the predicted appointment time for said each other patient appointment comprises in the scheduling server restacking the ordered list and requires at least one of provider approval of the restacked list, patient acceptance of the changed check-in, patient rejection of the changed check-in, or a patient response to the changed check-in.

“3. The method of claim 1, further comprising sensing of the duration of the patient’s appointment by sensing one or more of the following: a provider or staff pressing a key or a button on the provider device to indicate the patient checking out, the patient texting or replying to a text message on the mobile patient device, or a medical records system pushing or replying to a pull from its database.

“4. The method of claim 1, further including: updating, using the electronic medical record database of the at least one commercial data base vendor with a more accurately predicted start time of said each patient appointment.

“5. The method of claim 1, further comprising: in response to a determination of a predicted patient duration being exceeded, (i) using the electronic medical record database of the at least one commercial data base vendor to determine if the patient has checked out, and (ii) establishing, the actual appointment duration based on the determination of whether the patient has checked out.

“6. The method of claim 1, wherein the patient comprises a first patient, and further comprising: the scheduling system notifying a second patient electronically of a more accurately predicted start time of the patient appointment time of the second patient.

“7. The method of claim 1, wherein the patient comprises a first patient, and further comprising using the scheduling server of the patient scheduling system located across the first connection to the Internet from the healthcare provider and located across the second connection to the Internet from the at least one commercial database vendor to execute 1) notifying a second patient electronically of a more accurately predicted start time of the patient appointment of the second patient, and a) receiving, from the second patient, an acceptance of the more accurately predicted start time confirming the second patient can comply.

“8. The method of claim 1, wherein the patient comprises a first patient, and further comprising using the scheduling server of the patient scheduling system located across the first connection to the Internet from the healthcare provider and located across the second connection to the Internet from the at least one commercial database vendor to execute 1) notifying a second patient electronically of a more accurately predicted start time of the patient appointment for the second patient, 2) receiving from the second patient an acknowledgment confirming whether the other second patient has accepted or rejected the more accurately predicted start time, 3) in response to a determination that the second patient has accepted the more accurately predicted start time, causing the predicted appointment duration of the second patient to be adjusted accordingly in the ordered list, and then 4) updating the predicted appointment timing for said each other patient appointment in the ordered list to more accurately predict the start time of said each other patient appointment.

“9. The method of claim 1, including using the scheduling server of the patient scheduling system located across the first connection to the Internet from the healthcare provider and located across the second connection to the Internet from the at least one commercial database vendor to execute: notifying the patient electronically that the patient’s appointment is within a certain number of minutes; sending a query asking the patient if the patient will be late and by how long; and adjusting, based on the patient’s response to the query, the predicted appointment duration of the patient.

“10. The method of claim 1, wherein in response to a determination that a patient does not check-in within a certain period of time, the method further comprises: adjusting the ordered list to exclude the patient, fill in another patient appointment, and then updating the predicted appointment timing for said each other patient appointment in the ordered list to more accurately predict the start time of said each other patient appointment.”

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

For the URL and additional information on this patent, see: Sanderford, Britton. System and method for scheduling patient appointments. U.S. Patent Number 11282041, filed November 4, 2016, and published online on March 22, 2022. 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=11282041.PN.&OS=PN/11282041RS=PN/11282041

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