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NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.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
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IN RE: ANGADBIR SINGH SALWAN,
Appellant
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2023-1251
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Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark
Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in No. 16/206,728.
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Decided: September 14, 2023
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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
Case: 23-1251 Document: 32 Page: 5 Filed: 09/14/2023
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.