A system and method for assessing the immunological status of one or more individuals in a patient population is presented. The method includes establishing a database comprising a plurality of records of information each representative of the immune status of an individual in the population, each of said records including (1) current information from one or more assays for the presence of a biochemical, and (2) individual specific information comprising one or more of said individual's medical history, said individual's doctors' observations and historical, demographic, lifestyle, and familial information relating to said individual. The method further includes processing the information in said database to find trends or patterns relating to the immune status of individuals in said patient population; and using the said trends or patterns as part of a health care related decision making process. In exemplary embodiments of the present invention, processing the information in the database includes generating a list of correlations between variables or fields in the database. The correlations in the list can be further refined automatically, and a set of hypotheses or literature citations can be linked to the final correlations. The correlations, the processing, their associated hypotheses can then be reported to a user or automatically fed into another system component to generate a medical or health related decision. In exemplary embodiments of the present invention, a first assay panel containing a plurality of cytokine assays can be administered and the results processed. Based on automatic analyses of the cytokine data, a second tier or set of assays can be run on the same individual. The cytokine assay results being used to inform the contents of a second assay panel.