Patent ID: 8388348

Claim:
A computer-implemented method to determine an attribute of a simulated patient's state resulting from a patient-physician encounter, the method comprising: storing, in the one or more computers, a plurality of patient-physician encounter records, wherein the patient-physician encounter records are associated with one or more treatment moves; receiving, in the one or more computers, a current treatment move and an initial value of the attribute; calculating, in the one or more computers, a current maximal expected incremental effect value of the current treatment move over a previous treatment move on the attribute to represent the maximal expected incremental effect value for a simulated future state of the patient, and displaying an indication of the future state of the patient to a user; attenuating, in the one or more computers, the current maximal expected incremental effect value based on an amount of time between the previous treatment move and the current treatment move, wherein the amount of time is not known at the time that the maximal expected incremental effect value is determined; summing, in the one or more computers, the attenuated current maximal expected incremental effect value with a previous maximal expected incremental effect value, as previously attenuated based on the previous treatment move and the initial value, to generate an updated attribute value of the simulated patient's state that is associated with the simulated state of the patient at the time of the current move, wherein the time of the current move is earlier than the time of the future state; and generating, in the one or more computers, a patient-physician encounter that includes the updated attribute value; wherein the summing iteratively updates the updated attribute value based on successive current maximal expected incremental effect values as calculated in the one or more computers.