Appeal 2006-3163
Application 09/747,661
to communicate the diagnostic test results to a client such as a doctor’s
office or a clinic over a network.
The Appellants argue regarding claims 31 and 41 that the applied
references do not disclose medical procedure statistics associated with a
medical diagnosis system for analyzing the productivity of a medical
resource that includes the medical diagnosis system (Br. 15-17). Crane
discloses that the information used by Crane’s master processor in managing
the patient flow and clinic resources (col. 21, ll. 12-15) includes the patients’
diagnosis/test data (which reasonably appears to include medical procedure
data) (col. 25, ll. 62-64; col. 26, ll. 19-21). That disclosure by Crane would
have led one of ordinary skill in the art, through no more than ordinary
creativity, to combine the patients’ data as statistics because that is what
would be useful in carrying out the desired management of the resources and
the patients as a group (col. 22, ll. 10-11). See KSR Int’l. Co. v. Teleflex
Inc., 127 S.Ct. 1727, 1741, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1396 (2007) (In making the
obviousness determination one “can take account of the inferences and
creative steps that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ.”).
We therefore are not convinced of reversible error in the Examiner’s
rejections.1
1 Powers, Wong and Kenner are merely cumulative.
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