Researchers Submit Patent Application, “Care Lifecycle Tele-Health System And Methods”, for Approval (USPTO 20230162871): Patent Application

2023 JUN 12 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- From Washington, D.C., NewsRx journalists report that a patent application by the inventors Ali, Arshad (Roseville, CA, US); Artif, Ijaz (Roseville, CA, US); Khatri, Abdul Rahim (San Ramon, CA, US), filed on November 21, 2022, was made available online on May 25, 2023.

No assignee for this patent application has been made.

News editors obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “Telemedicine has a variety of applications in patient care, education, research, administration, and public health. Some uses such as emergency calls to 911 numbers using ordinary telephones are so commonplace that they are often overlooked as examples of distance medicine. Other applications such as tele-surgery involve technologies and procedures that are still in the experimental stage. The use of interactive video for such varied purposes as psychiatric consultations and home monitoring of patients attracts much attention and news coverage, although such applications are far from routine in everyday medical practice.

“For many decision makers, the case for new or continued investment in telemedicine remains incomplete, particularly given the competition for resources in an era of budgetary retrenchment in health care and government. Most clinical applications of telemedicine have not been subjected to systematic comparative studies that assess their effects on the quality, accessibility, or cost of health care. Although telemedicine is hardly unique among health care services in lacking evidence of its effectiveness, the increasing demand for such evidence by health plans, patients, clinicians, and policymakers challenges advocates of clinical telemedicine to undertake more and better evaluations of its practicality, value, and affordability.

“The first problem with tele-health systems identified by the inventors is the lack of connectivity to many of the surrounding systems

“One of the problems identified by the inventors is that traditional hospital information modules (HIM) do not deal well with the rubric of the tele-health work stream namely integrating with a number of tele-health and electronic healthy records (EHR) products while maintaining compliance with HIPAA HEALTH INSURANCE PORTABILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 1996 (HIPAA) and other privacy regimes that indirectly impact data sets related to PHI (Personals Health Information)

“A second problem identified with respect to tele-health-HIM systems is that alerts that would be seen in a large number of internal systems at hospital are not seen by a tele-health consultant or in many cases do not exist in an ambulatory HIM. These missing or mistimed alerts can significantly alter a treatment regime if missed from a tele-health diagnosis.

“A third problem identified with respect to the tele-health HIM is missing data from the various EHR sources that would normally be input by an attending nursing staff or medical assistant. This in many cases is missed as the patient in some cases is out in the field being tended to by an EMT or in a smaller care facility where the respective attendants lack the training or the focus to input data correctly.

“Another problem identified is that tele-health takes the patient in a number of locations where full diagnostic or EHR data is missing for the tele-health HIM usage. Thus a problem of how to fill in or estimate missing data is also a substantial problem with the tele-health expert being shown a scene from an accident, a battlefield, an ambulance or other non-clinical settings presents itself to the tele-health expert.

“Another problem identified is that consultants maybe in remote sites as well limited by bandwidth or connectivity and a tele-health system struggles to provide the right information at the right time

“Another problem identified is that patients and consultants may both be in transitory or ambulatory conditions and a tele-health system struggles to adapt to this right information at the right times

“Another problem identified is the ability of patient handoff and coverage between care providers, ambulance services, EMTs and to successfully transfer all related matters between systems to from initial care to handoff to hospital to release and home care

“Another problem identified by the inventors is related to patient self-care of the patient after hospital/clinic care. In many cases the patient drops off the map after an episode of care. The inventors have identified that there is no good mechanism for monitoring post care patient conditions and its additional goals of reducing readmissions and early diagnosis of post care issues based on monitoring.

“Another related problem identified by the inventors is that tele-health should, but does not, offer post care monitoring of healthy lifestyle changes by a patient based on post care monitoring and trends based on post care data monitoring.

“Another problem identified by the inventors also includes the ability of tele-health system that work with remote teams of consultants and care members in consulting on a remote patient from more than many locations simultaneously. More concise management of schedules, availability, and skill sets to uniquely address a particular client represents a very complex problem to solve.

“Another problem identified by the inventors is the use of call centers to schedule and align consultants to a particular patients is very ponderous and difficult to optimize when a highly skilled consultant is desired for a consultation and offers few options to create consultation queues which would allow a particular provider to direct calls/consults to an immediately available consultant or to be queued for a particular consulting practice.

“Another problem identified by the inventors is that a consultant in most tele-health instances is prevented from virtual “rounding” or visiting a number of similarly situated patients where a consultant can switch between consults virtually and give similar advisory or nuanced advisory depending on the related diagnosis requested.

“Another problem identified by the inventors is that tele-health systems do not allow for the conditional triage of patients to the tele-health system where the more seriously ill patients to queue and alert the consultant to the more serious patient in queue and allow them to be promoted to the consultant for immediate review.

“Another problem noticed is tele-health’s’ lack of auto-routing of patients to the right specialist. Of particular concern is for consultations where the patient is gravely ill or time is of the essence for treatment, it is particularly problematic if tele-health calls to consultants aren’t routed to the appropriate specialty and routed also shunted to a next consultant if the first choice is unavailable from a prioritized list of available consultants

“Another problem detected in tele-health systems is that textual and audio transcriptions of each session are not auto scribed, parsed and indexed for notes, auto-population of future consults or future suggestions for a clinical decision support systems

“And another problem noted by the inventors is a lack of continuous or continuity between episodes of care. The lack of this unity throughout a lifecycle of care for a patient may comprise: transitions from emergency response to treatment in an ambulance, to hospital care, to ambulatory care to home care all seem to contemplate a non-continuous care cycle.

“Another problem identified is that patients post treatment vitals and recovery information is generally unavailable for monitoring.

“Following on to this monitoring problem, the inventors have identified an additional problem with the collection and presentation of subjective patient data surveys/EMR/imaging data. This problem is further exacerbated by the lack of AI tools for the remote patient monitoring (RPM) that would assist both in hospital and outpatient services like rounding by remote physicians that can be trained to alert or enhance the patient monitoring to detect variances that would normally not be caught by lesser skilled physician and potentially suggest causes for the variances to care specialists or alert monitoring teams to enhanced risks based on the monitoring profile.

“A problem further unaddressed in RPM is the analysis and detection of behavioral or psychological changes of patients in remote locations (home/clinics/Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF) that would enhance a diagnosis. In many tele-health interchanges, the video/audio linkages to not support a full emotional psychological profile by the interviewer. Finally, the automation and capture of tele-health interview notes between a consulting physician and a patient is also largely unaddressed in these systems.”

As a supplement to the background information on this patent application, NewsRx correspondents also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent application: “The inventors have identified a solution that answers these problems as well as several more as disclosed in this specification. The solution centers around a unified platform concept that allows the actors in a care lifecycle for a particular patient are particularly well suited for a modularized tele-health system that connects in a variety of methodologies to a variety of mobile/clinical/hospital/managed care technical platforms.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A tele-health system comprising: a tele-health subsystem further comprising a plurality of portals having a plurality of functionalities; wherein an individual portal from the plurality is unique to a particular actor in a continuum of care, the portal further comprising visual, auditory, textual and derived data presented in a controlled environment to enable a tele-health session; a patient located tele-health subsystem further comprising audio and video interchange between at least two locations; wherein the audio and video interchange is a treatment episode related to a patient generated at the patient portal; a consultant located tele-health subsystem further comprising audio and video interchange between at least two locations; wherein the audio and video interchange is a treatment episode related to a patient presented via a consultant portal; and an administration tele-health subsystem further comprising an administration of a tele-health episode related to a patient that manages a set of all related data collected and presented regarding a particular patient during care and further comprising a data update function that adds a set of new data upon new information about the patient generated by at least one of the consultants.

“2. The system of claim 1 further comprising a machine language algorithm that matches the consultant with factors selected from two or more comorbidities of the patient.

“3. The system of claim 2 further comprising a machine language algorithm that matches the consultant with factors selected from two or more factors of the consultants availability.

“4. The system of claim 3 further comprising a machine language algorithm that matches the consultant with factors selected from two or more availabilities of the consultant with a patients prior health record pushed out to the attending consultant.”

For additional information on this patent application, see: Ali, Arshad; Artif, Ijaz; Khatri, Abdul Rahim. Care Lifecycle Tele-Health System And Methods. U.S. Patent Application Number 20230162871, filed November 21, 2022 and posted May 25, 2023. Patent URL (for desktop use only): https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/external.html?q=(20230162871)&db=US-PGPUB&type=ids

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)