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 Posted by Tim Cook on Friday June 03, 2005 @ 08:50 PM
from the It'd be Funny if it wasn't true. dept.
The US Patent and Trademark office has received a patent application for an open source electronic medical record.
Digg this article
The application number is US 2004/0172307 A1 Publication date: Sept 2004.
I found the prior art differentiating factors particularly entertaining:
"(0012) The present invention addresses the limitations of the prior art in that the system in accordance with the present invention is Internet-based, patient-centered, patient-controlled, provider-funded and open source. This unique combination promotes acceptance by patients, physicians and institutions and allows all to experience the benefits of a complete, comprehensive, easily available and robust lifetime medical record."
The searchable USPTO website is located here http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
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Re: Open Source EMR Patent
by Tim Churches on Saturday June 04, 2005 @ 07:42 AM
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The applicant, Martin A. Gruber, of Lido beach NY, appears to be an orthopaedic surgeon. See http://www.nyssos.org/board.shtml and serach for Gruber. His attorney golfing buddies must have decided to milk him for some money and convinced him to spend up on a patent application through them. However, he has wasted his money because even if granted, there is so much prior art that it would be thrown out of any court in a jiffy. One obvious bit of prior art is teh PING system, itself teh subject of a granted US patent, and which is also open source, and which predates his priority date. Anyway, it appears that it is a US-only application, so no problem for the rest of the world anyway.
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Re: Open Source EMR Patent
by Frank Valier on Saturday June 04, 2005 @ 02:22 PM
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This is a particularly cumbersome environment in which EMRs are emerging as artifacts of medical technology and should not be dismissed too lightly, even tongue in cheek. The recent globalization of economics has changed all commerce dramatically, including medical economics. Patents will be particularly troublesome for EMRs nationally and internationally as well. The outcome of the effects on medical practice is very speculative at this point in time. It is more disruptive to commercial interests than medical practice. Physicians have always found a way to improve their patients regardless of the difficulties presented by commercial objectives. The best predictor of what individuals will do is what they have done in the past.
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Re: Open Source EMR Patent
by skoba on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @ 11:57 PM
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I reported this to /.-jp.
There is a comment
In that patent "[0078] Open source--the system utilizes freely available public software to generate its system. (XML, MySql etc). "
Otherwise, It seems that the patent is stupid, because they wrote XML and MySQL consequently.
Oh! What the great innovation! XML and MySQL!
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