How to submit prior art on the Medicity Direct Patent

Recently Medicity has tried to patent the concept of a HISP. Please join me in submitting prior art to prevent this undermining of everything that the Direct Project stands for.

Groklaw shows the way

Here is a specific page that I had some trouble with and the right answers for it…

The Patent number in question is 61/443,549

The confirmation number is: 9529

The first names inventor is: Alok Mathur , Alpharetta, GA (US)

The date of file is: 02-16-2011

The strange string they are going to ask you in the middle appears to be: 201161443549

Read Groklaw carefully because the form is massively unnecessarily complex. (Because that is how the government rolls)..

The following prior art exists for their claims:

* Conversion of encrypted payload content, perhaps CCDs, into HL7 2.3 transactions sent to an EMR over TCP/IP ports

Of course, converting to HL7 v2 is not actually a good idea in 99% of the cases, but it was always part of the original vision of the Direct Project

http://wiki.directproject.org/page/diff/Direct+Project+FAQ/122979323

 

Just search this page for HL7 to find Arien discussing the need for HL7 2.x interoperability

or you can read about how we dithered over 2.x versions of HL7

http://wiki.directproject.org/share/view/21291669

I will no dignify the fact that they note that this happens over TCP/IP with a comment. Really, you are going to use the networks protocol for that?

Are you sure you do not want to use UDP? Or perhaps IPX? Wow. Innovation. <- (sarcasm, see note for USPTO employees below)

* Conversion of encrypted payload content, perhaps HL7 v3, into rendered PDF formatted reports that are automatically printed to a local printer device per the provider’s workflow preferences.

* Construct of a standard Direct compliant outbound S/MIME transaction with CCD attachments by converting native PDF or HL7 v2.x formats and contents.

This of course makes direct look like a fax machine. Which is a -huge- step backwards. But generally, converting between different healthcare interop standards has been done for quite some time.

A main goal of the HISP is to convert between various formats. We spent months talking about the particularly difficult conversions, i.e. Direct to IHE

http://wiki.directproject.org/Threat+Model+-+Direct+to+and+from+XDR

As far as I know the central advantage of a PDF is that you can print with it.

Here is Keith Boone discussing the issue on his blog

http://motorcycleguy.blogspot.com/2010/11/converting-from-hl7-version-2-message.html?showComment=1337606813597#c3948689104995255223

http://wiki.directproject.org/Session+Notes+6

 

This is 2 months too late but shows that we including printers as possible devices to send direct messages to.

The second set of claims is particularly annoying to me because I got involved in Direct specifically because it was not possible to do coordination of care without an underlying point to point messaging infrastructure.

  • Sharing of virtual care team records across disparate networks

  • Dynamic updates to disparate patient reocrds using encrypted serialized patient objects across disparate networks

  • Sharing of application context within applications across disparate networks

  • Sharing of user context within applications across disparate networks

  • Establishing long-term patient and provider object-level communication across disparate networks.

Its late, so my patience for this is wearing thin. Email handles “sharing PHI across disparate networks”. The whole fucking point of direct is that is -just- email.

So everywhere that Medicity is saying “share (PHI Type here) across disparate networks” they are full of shit. This is the problem that Direct itself solves.

Then the question becomes. “Hey, now that we have this amazing capacity to share PHI across disparate networks, what specifically should we share?”

Hmm… perhaps we should use this to keep patient records in sync… no shit.

(in case you cannot tell. The preceding text is sarcasm. I am saying this because someone from the USPTO might be reading this, and I am not sure you might not have picked up on that. Working at the USPTO might be the kind of job where you lose your sense of humor. I am just saying. )

The whole concept of a HISP is that it site on the edge of the Direct network and integrates the local environment into Direct.

Medicity has a HISP product. It does things that HISPs do.

They do not deserve a patent for concepts that are -both- obvious and well described by the Direct community during the -entire- process of developing Direct. The fact that the US government did not dictate what a HISP should do does not mean that it was not discussed carefully, completely and commonly by everyone working on this project.

The “HISP as a bridge concept” is something that I had a hand in creating. I do not appreciate my own work being co-opted and abused in this fashion. I am requesting that Medicity withdraw this patent application, and consider… I don’t know… competing for Direct HISP business, instead of applying for bullshit patents on ideas that were created as part of an Open Source project.

-FT