Patent Document ID: 7991485
Application ID: 11933185
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer-implemented method for acquiring and evaluating patient information, comprising the steps of: (a) querying a patient regarding conditions of the patient's health including symptoms and other indicia of disease or illness and processing input data that is based on responses to queries at step (a), and generating a chief complaint based on the responses to the queries and a medical history for the patient; (b) rule-based searching with a computer the input data in the medical history for predetermined medically significant words and phrases, and generating a set of preliminary diagnoses based on the chief complaint and the identified medically significant words and phrases; (c) rule-based searching with a computer the input data in the medical history for characteristic of the patient for a likelihood of each preliminary diagnosis generated in step (b) and generating a set of working diagnoses based on a predetermined likelihood of occurance value; (d) selecting a set of preliminary working diagnosis from the set of working diagnoses generated at step (c) based on predetermined criteria; (e) retrieving specific, relevant historical and up-to-date information relating to each working diagnosis of the set of preliminary working diagnoses; (f) rule-based searching with a computer of the input data in the medical history for predetermined quality of pain words and phrases, matching identified quality of pain words and phrases with the selected set of preliminary working diagnosis selected by steps (d), and generating a second set of preliminary working diagnoses based on matching identified words and phrases with the selected set of preliminary working diagnosis; (g) querying the patient as to one or more locations of pain and processing input data based on responses to the queries at step (g); (h) generating a second set of preliminary working diagnosis based on the input data according to the responses to the queries at step (g); (i) generating a list of differential diagnoses based on the second set of preliminary working diagnoses; (j) querying the patient as to risk information associated with the differential diagnoses and processing input data based on responses to the queries at step (j); (k) rule-based searching with a computer for guidelines based on the medical history and evaluating the differential diagnoses to confirm or exclude differential diagnoses from the list of differential diagnoses; (l) rule-based searching with a computer for treating the differential diagnoses confirmed at step (k); and (m) generating a report for a physician of a final diagnosis based on the confirmed differential diagnoses and including as part of the report the retrieved specific, relevant historical and up-to-date information at step (e) refined for the confirmed differential diagnoses.