Court Opinion

ID: 9839842
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-14 15:01:48.972653+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:41:37.677322
License: Public Domain

Case: 23-1251    Document: 32      Page: 1    Filed: 09/14/2023

         NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.

   United States Court of Appeals
       for the Federal Circuit
                   ______________________

         IN RE: ANGADBIR SINGH SALWAN,
                       Appellant
                ______________________

                         2023-1251
                   ______________________

     Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark
 Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in No. 16/206,728.
                   ______________________

                Decided: September 14, 2023
                  ______________________

     ANGADBIR SINGH SALWAN, Bethesda, MD, pro se.

    MAI-TRANG DUC DANG, Office of the Solicitor, United
 States Patent and Trademark Office, Alexandria, VA, for
 appellee Katherine K. Vidal. Also represented by KAKOLI
 CAPRIHAN, THOMAS W. KRAUSE, AMY J. NELSON, FARHEENA
 YASMEEN RASHEED.
                 ______________________

       Before DYK, PROST, and STOLL, Circuit Judges.
 PER CURIAM.
     Angadbir Singh Salwan appeals from a decision by the
 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) affirming the ex-
 aminer’s rejection of all pending claims of U.S. Patent Ap-
 plication No. 16/206,728 (“the ’728 application”) as directed
 to patent-ineligible subject matter and as obvious. In re
Case: 23-1251    Document: 32      Page: 2    Filed: 09/14/2023

 2                                              IN RE: SALWAN

 Salwan, No. 2022-003728, 2022 WL 8058103 (P.T.A.B. Oct.
 11, 2022) (“Board Decision”). For the following reasons, we
 affirm.
                        BACKGROUND
     The ’728 application is titled “Physician to Patient Net-
 work System for Real-Time Electronic Communications &
 Transfer of Patient Health Information.” The application
 “relates to a network system for real-time electronic com-
 munication and transfer of patient health information be-
 tween physicians and patients” and other health care
 entities. ’728 application ¶ [0003]. It is a continuation of
 U.S. Patent Application No. 15/188,000 (“the ’000 applica-
 tion”), which is itself a continuation of U.S. Patent Appli-
 cation No. 12/587,101 (“the ’101 application”). We have
 previously affirmed a rejection of the claims of the ’101 ap-
 plication as ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. In re Salwan,
 681 F. App’x 938 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (“Salwan I”). We have
 also affirmed a rejection of the claims of the ’000 applica-
 tion as ineligible. Salwan v. Iancu, 825 F. App’x 862 (Fed.
 Cir. 2020) (“Salwan II”).
     Claim 1 of the ’728 application is representative:
     1. A method for exchanging patient EMR [i.e., elec-
     tronic medical records] among healthcare user
     groups or the healthcare user group and patients
     over a network, the method comprising:
     providing a central computer program embodied in
     a computer readable medium or embodied in a cen-
     tral server and a central database storing patient
     EMR data for access by authorized users, the cen-
     tral program configured to:
     communicate through at least one computer pro-
     gram, which includes EMR and billing software,
     embodied in a computer readable medium with at
     least one private database for a healthcare user
     group, the database comprising at least patient
Case: 23-1251     Document: 32     Page: 3    Filed: 09/14/2023

 IN RE: SALWAN                                                3

     EMR and billing data, and accounting data confi-
     dential for the healthcare user group;
     receive from the at least one private database EMR
     data including at least one of health problems,
     medications, diagnosis, prescriptions, notes writ-
     ten by a healthcare service provider, diagnostic test
     results or patient accounts data for storing in the
     central database, wherein the healthcare user
     group’s confidential accounts data including one or
     more insurance companies’ accounts data, is not re-
     ceived;
     selectively retrieve the stored EMR data, generate
     one or more healthcare reports including one or
     more of health problem list, medication list, diag-
     noses report, prescription, diagnostic test result re-
     port, patient billing report; and
     transmit one or more healthcare reports to an au-
     thorized healthcare user group or the authorized
     patient for reviewing.
 ’728 application claim 1.
     The examiner rejected all pending claims in the ’728
 application as claiming ineligible subject matter under
 § 101 and for obviousness over several prior art combina-
 tions. Mr. Salwan appealed these rejections to the Board.
 The Board affirmed. Board Decision, at *1. It treated
 claim 1 as representative of the claims in the ’728 applica-
 tion. Id. at *3. The Board noted that the only change be-
 tween claim 1 of the ’728 application and the
 representative claim in Salwan II was a different pream-
 ble, which Salwan did not argue was limiting, and the ad-
 dition of “providing” before “a central computer program”
 in claim 1 of the ’728 application. Id. at *5. The Board
 concluded that Salwan II controlled the disposition here
 under the law-of-the-case doctrine and independently fol-
 lowed our reasoning in Salwan II because there were no
 pertinent differences between the representative claims in
 the ’728 and ’000 applications for the purposes of
Case: 23-1251    Document: 32      Page: 4    Filed: 09/14/2023

 4                                              IN RE: SALWAN

 evaluating eligibility. Id. at *5–6. The Board also affirmed
 the rejection of the claims as obvious. Id. at *6–10.
    Mr. Salwan timely appealed from the Board’s decision.
 We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(4)(A).
                         DISCUSSION
     We review the Board’s conclusion that claims are di-
 rected to patent-ineligible subject matter de novo. In re
 Rudy, 956 F.3d 1379, 1383 (Fed. Cir. 2020). We determine
 eligibility using the two-step process set out in Alice. At
 the first step, we “determine whether the claims at issue
 are directed to a patent-ineligible concept,” such as an ab-
 stract idea. Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 573
 U.S. 208, 218 (2014). At the second step, “we must examine
 the elements of the claim to determine whether it contains
 an inventive concept sufficient to transform the claimed ab-
 stract idea into a patent-eligible application.” Id. at 221
 (cleaned up).
     Salwan II addressed a nearly identical claim. The rep-
 resentative claim in Salwan II (1) contained a different
 preamble, “[a]n EMR computing system for exchanging pa-
 tient health information among healthcare user groups or
 the healthcare user group and patients over a network, the
 system comprising,” and (2) lacked the word “providing”
 before the limitation starting with “a central computer pro-
 gram . . . .” 825 F. App’x at 864. There are no other differ-
 ences between claim 1 here and the representative claim in
 Salwan II.
     We agree with the Board that our decision in this case
 should mirror our decision in Salwan II. In Salwan II, we
 determined at step one that the claim was “directed to com-
 munication of patient health information over a physician-
 patient network” and required “receipt and storage of pa-
 tient health information data.” Id. at 865–66. We deter-
 mined this was directed to the abstract concept of
 “organizing human activity with respect to medical infor-
 mation.” Id. at 866. The minimal differences between
 claim 1 here and the representative claim in Salwan II lead
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 IN RE: SALWAN                                              5

 us to the same conclusion. Claim 1 here is still directed to
 the abstract idea of receiving and storing patient infor-
 mation. For example, the fact that the preamble here re-
 cites that claim 1 is a method rather than a system does
 not change our analysis, since the method is directed to the
 same patent-ineligible concept as the system claim in Sal-
 wan II.
     At step two, we determined that the additional claimed
 elements in Salwan II of a generic “network,” “computer
 program,” “central server,” “device,” and “server for pro-
 cessing and transferring” do not transform the abstract
 idea into a patent-eligible invention. Id. at 866. We reach
 the same conclusion here. Claim 1 takes the “well-known
 process related to organizing patient health, insurance,
 and billing information,” id., and simply directs an imple-
 menter to “apply it with a computer,” Alice, 573 U.S. at 223.
 The recited method steps do not transform the abstract
 idea into patent-eligible subject matter.
     Mr. Salwan does not separately argue that any of the
 remaining claims are eligible for different reasons than for
 claim 1. We therefore conclude the remaining claims are
 ineligible. See Berkheimer v. HP Inc., 881 F.3d 1360, 1365
 (Fed. Cir. 2018). Because we conclude that all pending
 claims are directed to patent-ineligible subject matter, we
 do not reach the merits of the Board’s application of the
 law-of-the-case doctrine or the Board’s obviousness rejec-
 tions under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
                        CONCLUSION
     We have considered Mr. Salwan’s remaining argu-
 ments and find them unpersuasive. For the foregoing rea-
 sons, the Board’s decision is affirmed.
                        AFFIRMED
                            COSTS
 No costs.