Researchers Submit Patent Application, “Digital Healthcare Patient Identification Utilizing Non-Fungible Tokens”, for Approval (USPTO 20240013169): Patent Application

2024 JAN 31 (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 inventor Dershem, Michael (Voorhees, NJ, US), filed on September 22, 2023, was made available online on January 11, 2024.

No assignee for this patent application has been made.

News editors 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 exist 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.

“Another significant issue that has recently become more critical is in relation to the urgent healthcare landscape to remediate the Novel COVID-19 infection and impact. There is an increasing need for healthcare providers, including hospitals, physician practices, pharmacies and other medical institutions, to require a quick, non-physical way to screen and capture consumer/patient data safely. This information is not readily asked in the electronic health record (HER) systems. Such screenings have become increasingly and needed on a timely basis in order to provide correct treatment, while protecting the safety of the medical community. The HER screenings must also be dynamic to adjust to changing needs based on specific information requirements by federal, state, local governments and other institutions. Such needs have not heretofore been met in the art.

“A non-fungible token (NFT) is a blockchain-based asset which is not interchangeable with any other (not fungible). An NFT is created by uploading a file, such as a digital artwork, to an NFT auction market. This creates a copy of the file, which is recorded as an NFT on the digital ledger. The NFT can then be bought with cryptocurrency and resold. NFTs are used to commodify digital items, such as digital art, video game items, or music. NFTs have not heretofore been utilized to identify patients or to secure patient data. Moreover, NFTs have not been used to allow patients to control access or transparency of their own medical data.

“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.”

As a supplement to the background information on this patent application, NewsRx correspondents 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.

“In view of the recent pandemic of the coronavirus and COVID-19 outbreak, as well as other virulent disease outbreaks, data from patient intake screenings will be collected, collated and sent online to the provider, as well as captured for use by any worldwide governments worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO), and any other identified health organizations in need of this real-time collection of patient data. The benefit of secure, non-physical digital healthcare data capture is urgent and significant during the present novel COVID-19 pandemic and can be a universal approach to regular or notable events for all healthcare providers, government border agencies, hospital systems, pharmacies and other healthcare industry institutions.

“The present disclosure provides of the use of NFTs to allow unique patient identification. Moreover, NFTs provided herein patients with the ability control access and transparency to their data.

“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 realizing stored value for services rendered to a customer comprising: gathering the customer’s data from a plurality of sources from records related to the services used by the customer and which identify the customer with a unique customer identifier; creating unique internal identifiers for the customer by mining from the records data associated with the customer so that the data can be used in blockchain transactions for the customer and associating the unique internal identifier with the unique customer identifier; creating a non-fungible token (NFT) by attributing all of the gathered data of the unique customer identifier to a digital file; and associating the NFT with a stored value that can be used by a customer to pay for services so that the NFT acts as a voucher for services rendered to the customer.

“2. The method of claim 1 wherein the NFT is created after the unique internal identifier has been associated with the unique customer identifier.

“3. The method of claim 1 wherein the NFT is created before the unique internal identifier has been associated with the unique customer identifier.

“4. The method of claim 3 wherein the NFT is associated with a different customer.

“5. The method of claim 2 further comprising parametrizing the data associated with the customer while attributing future data gathered to the NFT and linking so that all data attributable to the customer is stored in the NFT file.

“6. A system for realizing stored value for services rendered to a customer comprising: a memory; and a processor that is configured to receive data from the memory for processing, the processor being further configured to: gathering the customer’s data from a plurality of sources from records related to the services used by the customer and which identify the customer with a unique customer identifier; creating unique internal identifiers for the customer by mining from the records data associated with the customer so that the data can be used in blockchain transactions for the customer and associating the unique internal identifier with the unique customer identifier; creating a non-fungible token (NFT) by attributing all of the gathered data of the unique customer identifier to a digital file; and associating the NFT with a stored value that can be used by a customer to pay for services so that the NFT acts as a voucher for services rendered to the customer.

“7. The method of claim 6 wherein the NFT is created after the unique internal identifier has been associated with the unique customer identifier.

“8. The method of claim 6 wherein the NFT is created before the unique internal identifier has been associated with the unique customer identifier.

“9. The method of claim 8 wherein the NFT is associated with a different customer.

“10. The method of claim 7 further comprising parametrizing the data associated with the customer while attributing future data gathered to the NFT and linking so that all data attributable to the customer is stored in the NFT file.

“11. 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 customer related data from a plurality of statements which identify customers with customers’ unique patient identifiers; create unique internal identifiers for each of the customers having unique patient identifiers; determine whether the data gathered for each customer is sufficient for block chain transactions; when the gathered data is sufficient for block chain transactions, de-identifying each of the customer statements to remove data related to customer identity in the statements; and create a non-fungible token (NFT) by attributing all of the gathered data of the unique customer identifier to a digital file; and offer to the customer an opt-in customer id that allows the customer to direct information important for contextual data analysis to be stored in the NFT data file control access to the data.

“12. The processor of claim 11, wherein the processor is further configured to consolidate separate, disparate customer identifying information which may exist across to create a self-directed customer identifier that the customer controls.

“13. The processor of claim 12, wherein the processor is further configured to contextualize the data to create contextual markers which implement spatial and/or customer geography.

“14. The processor of claim 13, wherein the processor is further configured to provide access to customers of an enterprise stored value (ESV) in the block chain transaction to allow the customer to pay for services through the ESV.

“15. The processor of claim 14, wherein the value of the ESV is a crypto-currency.

“16. The processor of claim 14, wherein the value of the ESV is stored in the NFT file.

“17. The system of claim 16, wherein the processor is further configured to authenticate the customer’s identity in the block chain transaction.

“18. The system of claim 17, wherein the processor is further configured to authenticate the customer’s identity in the block chain transaction.”

For additional information on this patent application, see: Dershem, Michael. Digital Healthcare Patient Identification Utilizing Non-Fungible Tokens. U.S. Patent Application Number 20240013169, filed September 22, 2023 and posted January 11, 2024. Patent URL (for desktop use only): https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/external.html?q=(20240013169)&db=US-PGPUB&type=ids

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