Title: Personalized Health Care Communication System and Method
Background The present invention is related to the communication of health care related information, and in particular to an online system for communicating personalized information between a medical professional and a patient.
Medical portals and health related web sites provide a vast amount of health related information in a variety of contexts. For example, U.S. Patent No. 5,951,300, entitled "Online System and Method for Providing Composite Entertainment and Health Information, " incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, is directed to the generation of composites on a central server in communication with an entertainment server and a health server.
However, in order to take advantage of the information available through these Internet-based resources, an end user must first search out relevant web sites. If the end user finds a relevant web site, the end user must become familiar with the particular web site and then search out information that relates to the end user's interests or needs. Often the end user must examine a vast amount of information, the majority of which is not useful to the end user. Further, when the end user does find material of interest, the end user often does not know if the information is trustworthy.
Internet-based electronic medical records (EMRs) provide a different approach to the communication of health related information. Internet-based EMR systems allow patients to view and amend their medical charts, enlisting the patient as an equal partner in the medical documentation process. However, physicians routinely dislike and often dismiss patient-entered EMRs, as the layperson often misdiagnosis his symptoms or uses medical terminology inaccurately. The
clinical ramifications of inaccurate medical language or information reported by the consumer can be disastrous.
In a related approach to the communication of health related information, some companies provide personal medical record retrieval systems for emergency medical situations. Some of these systems provide a user with her medical record in a CD ROM that a physician can access using a computer with a CD ROM drive. One system in particular allows a user to create a web-based medical record for emergency situations. Typically, a patient must give a physician permission to access the information on the CD ROM.
Such an approach can be useful, but has serious drawbacks . A patient must be conscious and sufficiently aware to communicate to her physician that this medical record retrieval system exists. Further, as noted above, if a patient can edit her medical record, the consequences can be disastrous. Finally, this system does not provide guidance to a patient seeking health related information on the Internet.
Thus, there is a need for a system that allows physicians or other medical professionals to deliver personalized, trustworthy medical information to their patients. In addition, there is a need for a system that provides a patient access to her personalized medical information anywhere and anytime that is convenient. Further, there is a need for a system that utilizes the vast resources available on the Internet for the patient's benefit. Summary of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a system for communicating personalized information between a medical professional and a patient over a network. One embodiment of a system according to the invention includes a health related content source, a selection means or module, an optional commentary means or module, and a compilation means or module. The selection module is in communication with the content source for allowing a medical professional to select content
from the content source that is personalized for the patient. The commentary module allows a medical professional to provide commentary for the patient. The compilation module is in communication with the selection module and with the commentary module for compiling a personal patient file based on the selected content and on the commentary.
Another version of the invention is directed to a method in a computer network formed of a communication channel and a plurality of processors coupled to the communication channel for communication thereon. The method communicates personalized information between a medical professional and a patient. The method includes the steps of 1) providing a content selection module to a medical professional to allow the medical professional to select content from a source of health related content for presentation to the patient, 2) obtaining commentary from the medical professional for presentation to the patient, and 3) compiling a personal patient file based on the selected content and based on the provided commentary.
Yet another version of the invention is directed to a computer program product including a computer useable medium having computer readable program code embodied therein for communicating personalized information between a medical professional and a patient. The program code includes 1) a selection module adapted to communicate with a health related content source for allowing a medical professional to select content from the content source that is personalized for a particular patient, 2) a commentary module for allowing a medical professional to provide commentary for a patient, and 3) a compilation module for receiving selected content from the selection module and for receiving commentary from the commentary module and for compiling a personal patient file based on the selected content and based on the provided commentary.
Brief Description of Drawings
The foregoing and other advantages of this invention, the various features thereof, as well as the invention itself, may be more fully understood from the following description, when read together with the accompanying drawings in which: FIG. 1 is a schematic illustration of a system architecture which may be used to implement one embodiment of the invention;
FIG. 2 is a high-level flow chart illustrating the operation of the system of FIG. 1 ; FIG. 3 is an illustration of one embodiment of a medical professional interface that a medical professional can' access at the medical professional's communication device of FIG. 1;
FIG. 4 illustrates data fields, the data for which a medical professional either provides or selects from preexisting data using the interface of FIG. 3 ;
FIG. 5 is an illustration of the database structure which may be used by the system of FIG. 1 ;
FIG. 6 illustrates an example of a patient login page that a patient can access at the patient communication device of FIG. 1;
FIG. 7 is an illustration of a personal patient file that a patient can access at the patient's communication device of FIG. 1 after successfully completing the login page of FIG. 6 ; and
FIG. 8 is a schematic diagram of the database/audio server of FIG. 1. Detailed Description of the Illustrated Embodiments
The present invention is directed to systems and methods for relaying information, including personalized information, between a medical professional and a patient over a network. With reference to FIG. 1, one embodiment of the invention provides a system 10 including a server 26, e.g., a web server, connected to a wide-area network (WAN), e.g., the Internet. Also connected to the WAN are a medical
professional's communication device 22 and a patient's communication device 24a, 24b, e.g., personal computer, personal digital assistant, or cellular telephone, and a database/audio server 28. The database/audio server includes a database 30 as shown in FIG. 5. Alternatively, returning to FIG. 1, the database/audio server 28 can connect directly to the web server 26 using the optional connection 31, such as a local area network, serial modems, or other methods well known to those skilled in the art. In addition, a database/audio server 28 according to one embodiment of the invention can access a health care related content source 34 provider 32 through the Internet 20.
With reference to FIG. 2, the system 10, preferably in cooperation with a medical professional, operates to pre- select content 40 specific to, and appropriate for, the medical professional's practice. Then, preferably subsequent to a medical professional - patient interaction, e.g., an office visit, the medical professional selects content 42, e.g., hyperlinks, personalized for the patient. In addition, the medical professional can provide commentary 43 to the patient to guide the patient's examination of the content 42 or to summarize the content of the medical professional - patient interaction.
Once a medical professional has selected content 42 and optionally provided commentary 43, the system 10 compiles 44 a personal patient file based on the selected content 42 and on the provided commentary 43. Subsequently, the patient can access her personal patient file at her convenience. In one embodiment, the patient can access her personal patient file via her medical professional's web site 46. Alternatively, the patient can access her personal patient file via a third party web site. In either case, the system receives the patient request and sends the patient file to the patient's communication device 24a, 24b as a response to the request.
The patient can then interact 48 with the content in her personal patient file, for example, by examining the medical professional provided content, e.g., utilizing a provided hyperlink or network location address. As is described below, the system can record 52 the patient's interaction with the provided content as an indication of the amount of information a patient has received. In addition, the patient can electronically communicate with the medical professional 50 to provide feedback to the medical professional on a more continuous and convenient basis than is possible with telephone or face-to-face communication alone.
As noted above, subsequent to a medical professional - patient interaction, such as an office visit, a medical professional selects personalized content 42 for a patient. According to one embodiment, the medical professional, selects content 42 specific to a patient using a medical professional interface such as the one shown in FIG. 3. The interface can be a HTML (HyperText Markup Language) form document . Alternatively, the interface can be designed using other interfaces and techniques well known to those skilled in the art .
With Reference to FIGs . 3 and 4, the medical professional using a web browser can create or edit a patient record by entering a patient's name and date of birth in a system-provided medical professional interface . Alternatively, the medical professional can edit a patient record by selecting an existing patient name from a "select bar" repopulated via PHP-SQL (Hypertext Preprocessor Structured Query Language) queries of the system or medical professional database that includes existing patient records.
The medical professional can then input a medical condition of the patient, perhaps determined on the basis of a recent medical professional-patient interaction. The medical professional can associate content with the medical condition, e.g., using a select bar 54. For example, if the
patient has endometriosis, the medical professional can provide a link or network location address (e.g. Uniform Resource Locator - URL) to an endometriosis society web site, or preferably, to a particularly relevant portion of the endometriosis society web site. As noted above, the medical professional can also provide written commentary, a voice recording, or a video recording using a text box 56, audio input 60, or video input 58, respectively, depending on the medical professional's and patient's preferences and communication device capabilities. The medical professional provides the commentary to assist the patient in examining the selected content . The medical professional can then continue to enter more medical conditions for the selected patient, switch to another patient, or end the session. With reference to FIG. 4, one embodiment of the system 10 according to the invention records a variety of information in record 61 fields 62 in order to build a database on which to operate. Fields 62 created as a result of the medical professional's interaction with the medical professional interface include the doctor's username, and the patient selected. The system's database can further include a patient's email address, a patient history including ongoing conditions, current health status, last office visit date, last system visit date, audio/video file upload, text comments to the patient, archived resources, e.g., doctor provided content , system resourced, e.g., system provided content, and patient alert status .
With reference to FIG. 5, one embodiment of the system compiles databases 63 based on the medical professional - system interactions and based on the patient system interactions. The databases 63 include a table of medical professional records 72, a table of patient records 74, and a table of system records 76. A medical professional record 72 can include fields 78 such as user, record number, user name,
contact information, patient record numbers, medical professional resources, and selected system resources. A patient record 74 can include contact information, patient history and previously resources that have previously been selected for the patient. Finally, the system records 76 can include doctors in the system, patients in the system, usage parameters, and system resources and content.
Once the medical professional has provided content, and optionally commentary, personalized to the patient, the system compiles a personal patient file based on the databases such as those described in FIG. 5. The patient can request her personal patient file by logging into the system. A login page is illustrated in FIG. 6. Once the patient successfully logs in to the system (i.e., verifies her identity) , the patient can access her personal patient file 84. According to one embodiment, a personal patient file includes an email address hyperlink for the medical professional 70, as illustrated in FIG. 7. In addition, the personal patient file 84 includes pertinent patient information and specific content 82' selected for the patient by the medical professional based, for example, on a medical professional - patient interaction. The personal patient file 84 can be an HTML document. Alternatively, the system can compose a personal patient file 84 according to techniques known to those of skill in the art. With reference to FIG. 8, the database/audio server
28 may include a CPU 94 that accesses memory 96 via a system bus 114. The memory 96 may include an operating system 108, data files 112, and a variety of program applications 110.
The applications 110 may include a communication module (Task 1) for receiving end user or client browser requests and for returning system or server responses. The applications 110 also may include a selection module (Task 2) for communicating with a variety of health related content sources, e.g., 34, 36, 38 of FIG. 1. The selection module
(Task 2) allows a medical professional to select personalized content from the content source. The applications may further include a commentary module (Task 3) for allowing a medical professional to provide commentary to a patient, a login module (Task 4) for authenticating the, identity of the end user, and a logging or recording module (Task 5) for recording parameters of system interaction sessions. In addition, the applications' 110 may include a compilation module (Task 6) for receiving selected content from the selection module and for receiving commentary from the commentary module and for compiling a personal patient file based on the selected content. The communication, selection, commentary, login, and logging/recording modules may be software program modules on hardware modules, including firmware, to execute the tasks within the system.
In one embodiment, an http server serves PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) rich pages to the client via relative data provided from an SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. PHP running as a module of the server transacts data between the database server, the web server, and the client, e.g., patient browser. The SQL database server collects, records, and produces the supplied data to and from the clients (medical professionals, patients, and administrators) .
One embodiment of the system includes web-logging functionality to record patient, doctor, and visitor usage of the system including patent responses. This embodiment of the system incorporates software routines that reconcile user activity by referencing database queries, script requests, date, and time of requests with actions recorded in the database. The system 10 may use the same or similar following environmental variables provided by web server software to assist in its logging functionality: REMOTE_ADDR, REQUEST_METHOD, QUERY_STRING, HTTP_ACCEPT, REMOTE_PORT, HTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE, REDIRECT_UNIQUE_ID,. SCRIPT_FILENAME, HTTP ACCEPT ENCODING, REDIRECT_STATUS , REDIRECT_URL,
SCRIPTJRL, SCRIPT_NAME, REDIRECT_SCRIPT_URL DATE, TIME. The system 10 may also use the following same or similar environmental variables provided by the system software to assist in its web-logging functionality: Total Requests, Requests/Doctor, Requests/Patient, Visits/Doctor, Visits/Patient, Avg. Time/Doctor, Avg. Time/Patient, Audio/Video Files Transferred.
It will be clear to one skilled in the art that the embodiments described above can be altered in many ways without departing from the scope of the invention. Various relative arrangements of inputs and processing means are suitable for generating personalized health content. For example, generating rather than selecting the content (using artificial intelligence or rules-based systems) can achieve personalization of the content. Accordingly, the scope of the invention should be determined by the following claims and their legal equivalents.