Researchers Submit Patent Application, “Systems and Methods of Improving Communications Amongst Healthcare Professionals”, for Approval (USPTO…

Researchers Submit Patent Application, "Systems and Methods of Improving Communications Amongst Healthcare Professionals", for Approval (USPTO 20160378941)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Politics & Government Week -- From Washington, D.C., VerticalNews journalists report that a patent application by the inventor Pastuszak, Alexander W. (Houston, TX), filed on June 28, 2016, was made available online on January 5, 2017.

No assignee for this patent application has been made.

News editors obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: "Breakdowns in the communication of critical patient care information during treatment reduce treatment efficiency and quality, increase the risk of medical errors, and ultimately impact the bottom lines of the involved physicians and institutions. Increasing a physician's efficiency is linked to increased patient satisfaction, an improved ability to commit time to critically ill patients, and a decrease in medical errors. The rate of medical errors is rising as a direct result of work hour restrictions and a rising number of patient handoffs, putting patients at risk for suboptimal care. Furthermore, errors are directly linked to the ability of healthcare practitioners to order and interpret appropriate diagnostic tests, and measurable errors cost over one trillion US dollars annually, depending on the variables considered.

"With the expected rise in medical care demands coupled with a large influx of new physicians, the need for more efficient communication processes is tantamount to avoiding an even greater rise in treatment inefficiencies and medical errors. Numerous studies have projected a physician shortage and with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act set to give thirty two million Americans access to health insurance, baby boomers' increased needs for medical care as they age, and the likelihood of retirement for an aging physician workforce, concerns have only increased in recent years.

"When physicians transfer patient care responsibilities to one another, such as at the end of a day or shift, there is significant inefficiency as well as a high risk of data loss and error in data transfer due to the primarily manual data transfer process. Currently, this handoff process is accomplished by email, text, or phone communications between physicians, and is unstructured. For example, if a busy physician wishes to hand off his service to another physician for the night or weekend, the transferring physician will either email or text the details of each patient to the on call physician or verbally transfer these data, depending on the specialty and the preferences of the physician. There is typically no preset structure to the data, and whether all essential patient data are transferred during each handoff is questionable given this lack of structure and accountability in the current process. In fact, with new work hour restrictions on residents, the number of patient handoffs has increased, with a concomitant increase in the risk of medical errors, and no current methods to monitor the patient handoff across all residents or other healthcare professionals. Furthermore, the handoff process can take several minutes per patient, with a busy service requiring upwards of forty five minutes to hand off using current techniques.

"The Emergency Medicine Patient Safety Foundation (EMPSF) spearheaded the creation of the 'Safer Sign Out' program that developed a structured, albeit paper-based, process and established protocols for a more efficient handoff (www.safersignout.com). Another initiative, I-PASS, created a standardized, evidence-based handoff program comprising team training, a verbal mnemonic, and a structured printed tool, has also shown efficacy in decreasing medical errors.

"An electronic medical record (EMR) is a collection of data about a patient's medical history which may include the patient's medication and allergies, immunization status, laboratory test results, radiology images, physician and other healthcare provider notes, vital signs, demographic data, and billing information. It allows for an entire patient history to be viewed without the need to track down the patient's previous medical record volume and assists in ensuring data is accurate, appropriate and legible. Currently, an EMR is accessible through workstations within a hospital environment and using secure remote access. Limited access is available on mobile devices as well.

"A busy Emergency Department (ED) physician typically sees upwards of twenty patients per twelve-hour shift in a bustling environment with many distractions, often being pulled in numerous directions by staff and patient care issues. When the ED physician sees a patient requiring specialty service consultation, he or she must first identify a consulting physician, which may require manually going through a physician directory. Once the consulting physician is identified, the ED physician pages that physician and waits for a response, which translates to lost time for the ED physician, who can otherwise be engaged in caring for other patients. When the ED physician's call is returned, a conversation ensues that can take ten or more minutes per patient but may take place over a much longer time period due to each party being involved in the care of other patients. This communication requires the ED physician to accurately communicate data pertinent to the patient's problem in order to provide the consulting physician with enough information to assess the patient.

"Typically, this conversation is driven by the consulting physician, who requests the discrete elements of each patient problem. Once this conversation is done, the ED physician then waits for the consulting physician to arrive and determine a disposition for the patient, which may incur additional inefficiency. In fact, during an ED physician's twelve hour shift, over an hour is spent communicating with consulting physicians about patient care, transferring the type of data described above. Moreover, the consulting physician frequently splits his or her time between caring for his or her patients, often located in several hospitals, administering his or her practice, and responding to consults from various sources including the ED and the hospital floors and intensive care units.

"A busy consulting physician may have upwards of thirty patients he or she is caring for at any given time, and if caring for a large service, such as that in a busy trauma center or academic medical center, may have even more. Thus, keeping track of numerous patients at several different hospitals can be challenging, and is currently done using paper or the patient list system in the hospital EMR, which typically does not transfer between hospitals. When a consulting physician receives a page from an ED physician who is requesting the consulting physician see a new patient, the consulting physician must devote the time to obtaining the essential patient information he or she needs to address the patient's specific problem.

"If this process could be made more efficient, the ED physician's time could be reallocated to patient care, resulting in improved quality of care and increased revenue for the physician and hospital. In addition, if the accuracy of the data the ED physician transmits to the consulting physician were ensured, fewer medical errors would result.

"Both handoff and consultant communication are currently time consuming and subject to error as a result of the current process. Both are costing time and money for the hospital and physicians and affecting patient care delivery.

"The handoff process can take thirty minutes or longer, depending on the number of patients and details, adding up to a significant time commitment in a busy clinical setting. The consultation process may require several contact attempts and can be spread over an hour or more per patient, impacting the time that both the ED and consulting physician have to attend to other patient care matters. In addition, other discrete communication processes, such as queries from nurses to physicians or physician extenders regarding specific patients, direct communication between patients and physicians, and more broadly communication and coordination of care between the diverse medical specialties caring for patients with complex illnesses, further limit the optimization of patient care throughout the healthcare system. Verbal transfer of information may be inaccurate, increasing the risk of medical errors especially with the physician 'handing off' the information having been on duty for ten plus hours. Physicians managing information for multiple patients located in different hospitals become more complicated and keeping track of all patients can be confusing. The inefficiency of and inability to track these communication points limits the optimization of these processes, affecting quality of patient care."

As a supplement to the background information on this patent application, VerticalNews correspondents also obtained the inventor's summary information for this patent application: "Additional features and advantages of the present invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or can be learned by practice of the herein disclosed principles. The features and advantages of the disclosure can be realized and obtained by means of the instruments and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.

"Disclosed are systems and methods for optimizing discrete medical communication by leveraging diagnosis and patient specific data in Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and mobile technologies. Relevant patient data for specific communication processes are extracted from the EMR and passed to medical professionals on their mobile devices, enabling communication regarding specific patient issues in a secure fashion, with accountability and the ability to track and monitor these processes.

"In one embodiment, a communication platform optimizes the patient handoff process, providing structure and automated extraction of relevant patient data from the EMR based on diagnosis. Data is sent to an accepting physician and the patient care team in a secure, HIPAA-compliant fashion, is reviewed and patient care responsibility accepted. Additional data may be obtained through search of the EMR and the communication between patient care team members is tracked, permitting a consensus on patient care for each patient, resulting in a highly efficient, tracked process that permits accountability for all parties involved.

"In another embodiment, a communications platform sends essential data that a consulting physician needs, based on a patient's specific diagnosis and automatically extracted from the hospital's EMR, to the consulting physician in a secure, HIPAA-compliant fashion, significantly decreasing the amount of time needed to obtain such data via a conversation.

"In another embodiment, a communications platform tracks the communication between an requesting physician and a consulting physician to minimize both physicians' distraction from caring for their patients, and automatically alerts the requesting physician of the consultant's arrival at the patient's bedside.

"In another embodiment, systems and methods for patient handoff follow the Safer Sign Out and I-PASS structures delivered in electronic format, reconfirming the need as well as validating the workflow.

"In another embodiment, systems and methods provide integration with the EMR, permitting data extraction, eliminating data transcription errors and saving time.

"In another embodiment, systems and methods provide the ability to add verbal or typed notes.

"In another embodiment, systems and methods enable rapid and convenient review and management of handoffs and consultations on multiple patients from multiple locations.

"In another embodiment, a user may initiate and manage communication from a single application via their preferred method e.g. phone call, voice message, text message, or page.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

"The following drawings, in conjunction with detailed description, help clarify the features and advantages of the present disclosure. In the figures, similar components are identified using the same reference label. Multiple instances of the same component in a figure are distinguished by adding a second reference label.

"FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary but not exclusive communications platform for patient data transfer among healthcare practitioners, practiced in accordance with the principles of the present invention.

"FIG. 2 illustrates a workflow diagram practiced in accordance with the principles of the present invention for a patient handoff procedure.

"FIGS. 3a-3j illustrate exemplary but not exclusive screen shots of the exemplary user interface and templates displayed on the mobile device 102 for a handoff procedure.

"FIGS. 4a and 4b illustrate a workflow diagram practiced in accordance with the principles of the present invention for requesting a patient consultation.

"FIG. 5 illustrates a workflow diagram practiced in accordance with the principles of the present invention for responding to a patient consultation request.

"FIGS. 6a-6m illustrate exemplary but not exclusive screen shots of the exemplary user interface and templates displayed on the mobile device 102 for a consultation procedure."

For additional information on this patent application, see: Pastuszak, Alexander W. Systems and Methods of Improving Communications Amongst Healthcare Professionals. Filed June 28, 2016 and posted January 5, 2017. Patent URL: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=2917&p=59&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20161229.PD.&OS=PD/20161229&RS=PD/20161229

Keywords for this news article include: Patents, Genetics, Hospital, Medical Records, Records as Topic.

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