Patent ID: 8666759

Claim:
A method of exchanging documents among multiple medical practices relating to common patients, comprising the steps of: (a) receiving, by a centralized server, from a first medical practice: (i) first documents relating to a first patient of the first medical practice, (ii) at least two types of first personal identification information of the first patient, (iii) first consent preferences of the first patient indicating whether the first patient consents to the first medical practice sharing the first documents with other medical practices, and (iv) first sharing preferences of the first medical practice, wherein the first sharing preferences indicate whether the first medical practice is willing to share at least some of the first documents with other medical practices and wherein the first sharing preferences are independent from the first consent preferences; (b) receiving, by the centralized server, from a second medical practice: (i) second documents relating to a second patient of the second medical practice, and (ii) at least two types of second personal identification information of the second patient; (c) determining, by the centralized server, whether the first patient is the same person as the second patient if two or more types of the first personal identification information match two or more types of the second personal identification information; (d) relating the second documents and at least some of the first documents in a database if the first patient is the same person as the second patient, the relating based, at least in part, on the first consent preferences and the first sharing preferences; (e) receiving, by the centralized server, from the second medical practice, a request to retrieve documents associated with the second patient; and (f) granting access to the second medical practice to view the second documents and the at least some of the first documents, wherein the second documents and the at least some of the first documents are presented together to the second medical practice if the first sharing preferences indicate that the first medical practice is willing to share the first medical records with other medical practices and the first consent preferences indicate that the first patient does not prohibit sharing the first medical records with other medical practices.