Patent ID: 8000979

Claim:
A process for managing and tracking flow of patients throughout a healthcare enterprise comprising: providing computer network implemented software adapted to enter, process, retrieve, transfer, store and display data related to said enterprise and related to each of said patients who is in need of one or more health care services, said software performing the steps of: providing a unique patient identifier associated with each of said patients and creating a list of patient identifiers; checking-in each of said patients and creating from said list a patient queue comprising a list of patient identifiers corresponding to each checked-in patient; determining each health care service needed by each of said patients in need of one or more health care services; associating each health care service needed by each of said patients with one of a plurality of health care service departments of said healthcare enterprise; creating a health care service department queue for each department of said plurality of departments; determining efficiency of each health care service department in providing health care services by applying to each health care service department queue department priority selection rules for placing patients awaiting service at an assigned patient queue position, said selection priority based on data representative of and selected from the group consisting essentially of expected department waiting times, patient placement on said patient queue, notifications, VIP status, special handling criteria, scheduled versus unscheduled status, card privileges, management notifications, administration notifications, status queue changes, wait time criteria and whether a patient has not completed visits to all departments; linking said patient queue to each department queue; matching said patient queue for each patient who remains in need of a health care service to each corresponding department queue to provide matched patient and department queues; applying said priority rules to each of said matched patient and department queues to determine an expected priority position for each said patient on each said department queue; based on said expected priority position for each said patient, selecting one of said departments as a next receiving department for each said patient; and, routing each said patient to said next receiving department.