Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Health care management
Reexamination Certificate
1998-03-16
2002-02-05
Rimell, Sam (Department: 2166)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Health care management
C705S002000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06345260
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a system and method for scheduling appointments that is compatible for Internet, intranet, and extranet use. It relates to an asynchronous Internet and intranet-compatible scheduling interface for booking appointments with a professional, such as a doctor, or a professional service, such as a medical testing service (X-rays, blood tests, and the like), even when scheduling details may contain sensitive or highly personal information and when the office of the professional or professional service is closed.
At the present time it is not possible to schedule appointments with a doctor, for example, when the doctor's administrative offices are closed. Even when the offices are open, it is occasionally difficult to access the administrative office in order to schedule an appointment because of the number of telephone calls that such professionals often receive and the small staff-to-doctor levels used in some practices. At the present time there are also services which, on behalf of such patients, attempt to contact doctors' offices during the hours when their administrative offices are open and available to schedule appointments. However, even these services have difficulty in that if the doctor's line is busy or support personnel temporarily on break, they cannot get through to the administrative offices to set an appointment at the time desired and thereby complete the service to their client. It is also not possible for them to schedule appointments when a doctor office is closed.
Medical professionals such as doctors often employ answering services during the hours when their administrative offices are closed, but such services are not in a position to schedule appointments and simply will take messages and pass them on. In some instances such messages are conveyed to the office administrator on the next business day, or in the case of a perceived medical emergency, such messages may be sent to the doctor in the form of a wireless page for him to act on, if he can be reached.
Both circumstances are known to result in increased patient anxiety, in increased risk of aggravating an existing medical condition requiring immediate medical attention and for increasing the loss of care when such callers use more costly services such as hospital emergency rooms when they cannot contact their doctor or adequately satisfy their need for medical advice.
In none of these systems, however, has it been possible for the patient to have access to the doctors' appointment schedule for the following day or days to enable a patient or other party to schedule an appointment with the doctor at an appointed time. Nor is it possible at the present time to permit such access to schedule an appointment while at the same time protecting the privacy of the person attempting to schedule the appointment, as well as information regarding the doctors' other appointments.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention overcomes the problems of the prior art and is directed to a system and method for permitting scheduling of appointments for professionals and professional services when their administrative offices are closed.
Briefly stated, the present invention provides a system and method for scheduling appointments at any time with a professional, such as a doctor, dentist, veterinarian, or the like, or a professional service, such as a medical testing facility and the like, even when the office of the professional or professional service is closed.
As more particularly set forth below, the system and method relate to an asynchronous Internet, intranet, and extranet-compatible 24-hour appointment scheduling interface for making such appointments. As such, they support open-standards architecture, provide an interface for proprietary system architecture, permit off-line review and posting, permit access controls and virus protection, allow central scheduling without loss of distributed control, support encrypted messaging to ensure privacy, and include context-sensitive help.
The system and method also embrace and integrate over the Internet all of the existing office administration scheduling packages for professional offices, such as doctors' offices, regardless of the platforms used, i.e., PC, Apple or UNIX platforms, thereby permitting users to schedule and confirm, for example, doctor appointments in one consistent interface, regardless of the hardware or software utilized by either the party seeking to schedule an appointment or the individual doctor involved.
OBJECTS AND FEATURES OF THE INVENTION
It is a general object of the present invention to provide a fully integrated system and method for an asynchronous Internet, intranet- and extranet-compatible scheduling interface for scheduling appointments.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for receiving notification of an available appointment time and for scheduling appointments even when the administrative offices are closed.
It is another object of the present invention to allow for central scheduling without loss of local control.
It is yet another object of the present invention to permit users to schedule and confirm doctors' appointments in one consistent interface regardless of the computer hardware or software selected by their individual physician and regardless of whether the physicians' office does or does not utilize a computer.
It is also an object of the present invention to permit users to schedule and confirm doctors' appointments or medical facility appointments, regardless of the computer hardware or software they employ and even if they do not utilize a computer at all.
It is a further object of the present invention to resolve what has been an historical impediment to the smooth operation of after-hours call centers and doctor answering services, namely to complete the patient service by reviewing all available appointment times for all doctors in a field of specialization and geographic area proximate to the patient, and having selected the best one or several suited, scheduling an appointment when the medical professional's offices are closed.
It is still another object of the present invention to automate the scheduling process on an enterprise-wide basis and incorporating highly fragmented medical offices and individually-owned physician practices.
It is a feature of the present invention to replace a medical professional's answering service and traditional beeper and thereby enabling accurate diagnoses of patient conditions and then scheduling the appropriate medical service.
It is another object of the present invention to promote the interoperability of widely-used desktop applications, databases and operating system environments within the deeply fragmented healthcare industry.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to embrace and integrate over the Internet the leading present and future office administration and scheduling packages, contract management programs, personal information manager programs, personal data assistant (PDA) hardware, wireless two-way beepers and wireless beepers running on existing, as well as future desktop and client/server environments.
It is still another feature of the present invention to interface with proprietary electronic data systems for healthcare.
It is a further feature of the present invention to concurrently provide a foundation for easy migration of scheduling applications in the future.
It is a feature of the present invention to permit patients to schedule and confirm doctors appointments within the system interface without having to be concerned that their Web browser may not be directly compatible with the computer hardware or software selected by their physician and, if preferred, without either party being required to utilize a computer.
It is another feature of the present invention to eliminate any concern with hardware or software compatibility, and thereby to provide a seamless user, developer, and administrat
Cummings, Jr. Desmond D.
Shelton Robert H.
Allcare Health Management System, Inc.
Harle Jennifer I.
Hassell Andrew M.
Rimell Sam
Sigalos John L.
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