Method for automating collection of psychotherapy patient information and generating reports and treatment plans

Abstract

The method and apparatus automatedly generates various reports for a psychotherapy provider. These reports include Treatment Plans, progress reports, scheduling reports and billing reports. The progress reports include a Progress Note which incorporates various selected data into a report for the insurance company. As much of the data is selected from menus, the resulting report can maintain much patient privacy while being satisfactory to the insurance company. More private information can be stored separately in Expanded Text. A Treatment Plan is generated using the various selected data with respect to subsets of emotional factors, intellectual factors, physical factors, social factors, and spiritual factors. These subsets may be chosen randomly or with some periodic selection.

What is claimed is:  
     
         1 . An apparatus for providing historic documentation and prospective treatment advice for a plurality of psychotherapy patients for a psychotherapy provider comprising: 
 means for automated collecting and recording of psychotherapy data for the patients, said psychotherapy data being in a plurality of categories including historic and prospective information;    means for choosing a subset of categories from said plurality of categories;    means for storing a database comprising textual data corresponding to a plurality of possible psychotherapy data said data including prospective treatment advice;    means for referencing into said database by said psychotherapy data in said subset of categories thereby selecting a portion of said textual data including prospective treatment advice;    means for combining said portion of said textual data with psychotherapy data including historic data from said means for automated collecting and recording thereby automatically generating at least one historical and one prospective report.    
     
     
         2 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein the automated collecting and recording of patient psychotherapy data and the automated generation of the report of  claim 1  originates from, and is indexed to, a list of possible psychotherapeutic problems.  
     
     
         3 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein at least one report includes a relatively short form patient report and a relatively long term patient report.  
     
     
         4 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said at least one report includes prospective treatment advice.  
     
     
         5 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said at least one report includes historic information relating to the psychotherapy patient.  
     
     
         6 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said at least one report links the historical record of at least two psychotherapy patients.  
     
     
         7 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said database includes a psychological and psychiatric treatment encyclopedia.  
     
     
         8 . The apparatus of  claim 7  further including means for updating said treatment encyclopedia.  
     
     
         9 . The apparatus of  claim 1  further including means for scheduling therapy sessions for individual patients and simultaneously for a group of patients.  
     
     
         10 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said at least one report includes a billing report.  
     
     
         11 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said database is a relational database.  
     
     
         12 . The apparatus of  claim 2  wherein said list of possible psychotherapeutic problems is derived from medical literature and wherein the apparatus further includes means for revising said list of possible psychotherapeutic problems.  
     
     
         13  The apparatus of  claim 3  wherein generation of at least one report is automated through menu selections to the psychotherapy provider.  
     
     
         14 . The apparatus of  claim 7  wherein said treatment encyclopedia includes: 
 (a) a list of possible patient problems  
 (b) a list of possible behavioral definitions  
 (c) a list of possible assessment criteria  
 (d) a list of possible short term objectives  
 (e) a list of possible long term goals  
 (f) a list of possible therapeutic interventions  
 (g) a list of possible physical issues  
 (h) a list of possible emotional issues  
 (i) a list of possible patient coping mechanisms  
 (j) a list of possible suggested future treatments  
 (j) a list of possible related conditions  
 (k) a list of possible patient responses  
 
     
     
         15 . The apparatus of  claim 4  wherein said prospective treatment advice includes at least one set of assessment data, at least one short term objective, at least one therapeutic intervention and at least one long term goal for said at least one report.  
     
     
         16 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said historic information is available to psychotherapy providers at any time during operation of the apparatus.  
     
     
         17 . The apparatus of  claim 15  wherein said at least one assessment criteria, said at least one short term objective, said at least one therapeutic intervention, and said at least one long term goal are defined in terms of at least emotional factors, physical factors, intellectual factors, social factors, and spiritual factors.  
     
     
         18 . The apparatus of  claim 2 , wherein entries from said list of possible psychotherapy problems can be assigned a severity from a range of severities for each psychotherapy patient.  
     
     
         19 . The apparatus of  claim 18  wherein said assigned severities serve as a weighting factor for the selection of prospective treatment advice.  
     
     
         20 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said means for selecting said prospective treatment advice includes pseudo-random selection.  
     
     
         21 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein said means for selecting said prospective treatment advice includes periodic selection.  
     
     
         22 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein the means for automated collecting and recording of psychotherapy data is linked to said database comprising textual data through network means.