Asserted Claims of Patent For Measuring Physician Efficiency Invalid Under 35 U.S.C. § 101

The court granted defendant's motion for summary judgment because the asserted claims of plaintiff’s physician efficiency software patent encompassed unpatentable subject matter and found that the claims lacked an inventive concept. "⁠[Plaintiff] argues that the use of rules, such as assigning physicians to report groups and assigning episodes of care to physicians, and the limitation of calculating scores based upon 'predefined sets' of medical conditions is inventive. However, the use of these assignment rules and the limitation of using predefined sets is simply a way of organizing data and then performing an algorithm. . . . There is also nothing about the ordered combination of these steps that makes this abstract process less abstract because the steps still amount to collecting, organizing and analyzing data to calculate physician efficiency scores. [Plaintiff] argues that the asserted claims disclose a very specific method of calculating physician efficiency that is patent-eligible. . . . [H]owever, the problem with that argument is that the claim language, as opposed to the specification, is extremely broad."

Cave Consulting Group, Inc. v. Truven Health Analytics Inc., 3-15-cv-02177 (CAND December 15, 2017, Order) (Illston, USDJ)