Fed Circuit resuscitates heart monitoring patent
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has overturned a lower court’s decision to find a heart monitoring patent invalid under Alice, handing a win to medical laboratory company BioTelemetry.
On Friday, April 17, a divided Federal Circuit concluded that the asserted claims of US patent number 7,941,207 were directed to a patent-eligible improvement to cardiac monitoring technology and not an abstract idea.
The ‘207 patent, owned by BioTelemetry’s unit CardioNet, describes cardiac monitoring systems and techniques for detecting and distinguishing atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter from other various forms of cardiac arrhythmia.
CardioNet accused InfoBionic of infringing the patent and, in response, Infobionic filed a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, arguing that the asserted claims are directed to patent-ineligible subject matter under § 101.
Applying the Supreme Court’s two-step Alice framework, the district court concluded that the claims were ineligible.
However, late last week, the Federal Circuit overturned the decision, concluding: “At the heart of the district court’s erroneous step one analysis is the incorrect assumption that the claims are directed to automating known techniques.”
It added that nothing in the record supports the district court’s fact-finding (and InfoBionic’s assertion) that doctors long used the claimed diagnostic processes.
According to the Federal Circuit, the claims “focus on a specific means or method that improves” cardiac monitoring technology and are not “directed to a result or effect that itself is the abstract idea and merely invoke generic processes and machinery”.
A final issue
The court then turned to a dispute raised in the parties’ briefs and oral argument—whether the court can resolve this Alice step one issue without remanding to assess the state of the art as of the invention date to determine.
On behalf of the court, Circuit Judge Kara Stoll said: “We simply clarify that step one of the Alice framework does not require an evaluation of the prior art or facts outside of the intrinsic record regarding the state of the art at the time of the invention.”
Circuit Judge Timothy Dyk, concurring in judgment but dissenting in reasoning, took particular issue with this conclusion.
He said: “I dissent in part because the majority addresses issues never argued by the parties and appears to suggest approaches not consistent with US Supreme Court and circuit authority.”
Dyk argued that “limiting the use of extrinsic evidence to establish that a practice is longstanding would be inconsistent with authority”, before noting that no case has ever said that the “nature of a longstanding practice cannot be determined by looking at the prior art”.
In response to Dyk’s comments, the majority said it didn’t hold that it was impermissible for courts to look outside of the intrinsic as part of their Alice step one enquiry, but that there is no basis for requiring, as a matter of law, consideration of the prior art in the step one analysis in every case.
The Federal Circuit reversed the district court and remanded the case for further proceedings.
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