Applying State-of-Being to Healthcare Delivery

Categories: “Computer Science“

Reference: # 2012-040

OTC Contact: Zeinab Abouissa M.S.
Phone: 202-687-2702
Email: zaa9@georgetown.edu

DESCRIPTION

Numerous technologies aim to improve health care delivery. These include electronic health records, remote monitoring systems, and internet/network-based clinical decision support systems such as diagnozit.com and simulconsult.com. Automated health care delivery systems which have the ability to tackle the complex challenges of the healthcare sector often fail to take into account a person’s subjective state of being, such as mental health, appetite, self-perception of the ability to perform tasks, etc. Conventional health care delivery systems do not utilize the vast amount of information associated with a person that’s found on the internet including social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, etc.), most of which are readily available and easily obtained via opt-in registration. Conventional health care systems instead use statistically obtained reference data derived from the general public and apply it to an individual subject.

Researchers at Georgetown University developed a system and method that aids in directing a patient to select the appropriate form of treatment as well as routes the patient to the proper location of care. This is achieved by monitoring the health status of a patient through collecting temporal and longitudinal cross-section of measurement data of the patient’s health parameters, monitoring real-time medical telemetry, and inferring the patient’s subjective state of being. The inference of a patient’s state of being is achieved by obtaining information from the patient’s social network, inferring medical trends as information is gathered, and correlating symptoms and state of being from multiple patients. The system includes an application hosted by the patient which processes health status and medical information and compares it against stored symptom data to determine an appropriate treatment response.

Furthermore, the system can route communication to the appropriate healthcare provider or party when a person is in need of medical attention. Using conventional encryption approaches, the system can communicate important health data about a patient without violating laws and regulations governing sensitive or protected health care information.

INVENTORS

Eric Burger, Ph.D.
Howard Federoff, M.D., Ph.D.,
Ophir Frieder, Ph.D.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

US Patent no. 9,305,140, US Patent no. 10,162,940, US Patent application no. 16/189,216