Patent ID: 7774377

Claim:
A range-conversion method comprising: receiving medical data records, wherein each of the medical data records includes at least a portion of a corresponding patient's medical history that includes one or more data fields and a field value associated with each data field; identifying one or more of said data fields as a range-based data field; defining, by an authorized user who has authorized access to the medical data records, a plurality of text-based range descriptors, wherein each text-based range descriptor is associated with a range of field values for one of the range-based data fields; and generating a text-string for each of the medical data records, wherein the text-string includes one or more text-based data descriptors, such that each data descriptor includes: a field descriptor that defines a specific data field within the each of the medical data records to which the text-string is related, and a value descriptor that defines the field value associated with the specific data field; wherein a specific data record includes a range-based data field, the range-conversion method further comprising: incorporating, as the value descriptor of the text-string associated with the specific data record, the text-based range descriptor that is associated with the field value of the range-based data field included in the specific data record.