Patent Document ID: 9997260
Application ID: 12810021
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of retrieving similar patient cases from a medical database, the method comprising: storing, by the medical database, a plurality of clinical profiles, each clinical profile defined by a different medical condition and including a plurality of specifications associated with the medical condition, wherein each specification is associated with a weight, the weight indicating an importance of the specification to a diagnosis of the medical condition, wherein each clinical profile is divided into a plurality of levels with a set of the specifications within each level, wherein the specifications include comorbidities; storing, by the medical database, a plurality of patient cases comprising patient data, the patient data corresponding to one or more specifications; defining for each clinical profile, by a processor, membership rules defining degrees of membership in the clinical profile, wherein membership in the clinical profile is determined by a cumulative presence of one or more weighted specifications comprised in the clinical profile; indexing, by the processor, each patient case in the medical database as having a degree of membership in one or more clinical profiles based on the membership rules; receiving, by the processor, a current patient case comprising current patient data; searching, by the processor, the medical database comprising the plurality of clinical profiles and the plurality of patient cases; matching, by the processor, the current patient case against the plurality of clinical profiles resulting in a set of matching clinical profiles, wherein the matching includes comparing the patient data for the current patient case with the specifications to determine whether there is a match for any of the specifications; determining, by the processor, for each clinical profile from the set of matching clinical profiles, the degree of membership of the current patient case based upon the membership rules; and retrieving, by the processor, based on the clinical profiles in the set of matching clinical profiles, similar patient cases from the medical database that are identified as having a substantially corresponding degree of membership in at least one of the clinical profiles as the current patient case.