PATIENT TREATMENT AND MONITORING SYSTEMS AND METHODS WITH CAUSE INFERENCING

摘要

The invention provides apparatus and methods for delivery of health care, e.g., in-home or at central care facilities, that gather subjective and objective measures of patient health and treatment, analyzing them (e.g., correlating them with one another and/or with norms) and reporting them to aid in on-going patient diagnosis and treatment (both on acute and chronic bases), as well as to aid physicians, nurses and other caregivers in decision support, monitoring treatment compliance, facilitating regulatory compliance, billing, and so forth. Thus, for example, in some aspects a health care delivery device comprising a medical treatment apparatus, such as a hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis unit, that is coupled to a processor. The processor generates patient queries in connection with treatments rendered by the dialysis equipment (or other treatment apparatus). Further aspects of the invention provide a health care delivery system, e.g., as described above in which a digital data processing system is coupled to a plurality of health care delivery devices (e.g., via the Internet, etc.), which can disposed in treatment centers ranging from patient homes to commercial health care facilities such as hospitals, dialysis centers and so forth. Reporting functionality can, instead of or in addition to identifying (and reporting on) discrepancies in the raw and/or analyzed data from the delivery devices, infer (and report) on possible causes of those discrepancies and, in some aspects of the invention, remedy those causes, thereby, providing automated operations support for the treatment centers.