Patent ID: 7678071

Claim:
A method of delivering a medium to a patient employing a medical system having an ambulatory medical device (MD), for providing treatment to a body of a patient, and a communication device (CD) for sending messages to or receiving messages from the MD, the method comprising: storing a delivery profile containing a plurality of parameter values, each value corresponding to a predefined time period that is used to control the treatment provided to the body; providing the MD with at least one treatment amount numerical accumulator for accumulating numerical values corresponding to the fractional portions of a quantized amount; deriving an initial value for the numerical accumulator from the delivery profile; configuring the MD to provide at least one quantized amount of treatment to the body of the patient, upon the numerical accumulator accumulating a numerical value corresponding to at least one quantized amount of treatment; adding during each time interval, numerical values corresponding to fractional portions of quantized amounts to the numerical accumulator; and retaining a numerical value corresponding to the remaining portion of the quantized amount of the treatment in the numerical accumulator for later delivery; wherein configuring the MD to provide at least one quantized amount of treatment to the body of the patent comprises: delivering the medium to the body of a patient, with a pumping mechanism, in a series of discrete time intervals; wherein the amount of the medium to be delivered in each time interval is represented as a number of whole pump strokes or a number of fractional pump strokes; and wherein the numerical value corresponding to fractional pump strokes are added to the numerical accumulator to reach a value corresponding to the volume of a whole pump stroke and the MD is configured to deliver the medium in whole pump strokes.