Claim Construction Order

McKesson Information Solutions LLC v. Epic Systems Corp., Case No. 1:06-CV-2965 (N.D. Ga. Aug. 29, 2008) (Camp J.)

Judge Camp construed the claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,757,898 relating to a method for a health-care provider and a patient to communicate automatically and electronically with each other over the internet.

The Court rejected several of Epic’s (the accused-infringer’s) proposed constructions as overly broad and not specific to the patented invention. For example, Epic proposed constructions for the preamble terms “health-care provider” and “plurality of users” that would include not only medical doctors and patients, respectively, but also dentists, physical therapists and chiropractors as “health-care providers” and clients and consumers as “users.” The Court acknowledged that the invention described in the specification could be used for such similar services, but held that the claimed invention, by using the term “health-care” provider, was not so broadly defined.

Similarly, the Court disagreed with Epic’s proposed construction of “provider/patient interface.” The parties agreed that the interface is a web page that permits the provider and the user to communicate, but disputed what information is exchanged over the interface. The Court found that Epic’s proposed construction, which stated that the interface allows for the exchange of “information,” was overly broad. The Court agreed with McKesson’s proposed construction that the information being exchanged is “inquiries, responses, data, services, and information,” which was repeatedly recited in the specification.

For other terms, the Court rejected both parties’ proposed constructions and adopted its own. For instance, the Court adopted its own construction of the term “mapped content” based on the context in which that term was used in the claim. In addition, the Court construed the phrase “said provider/patient interface providing a fully automated mechanism for generating a personalize page or area” in a manner that recognized the distinction between the invention and the prior art and “excluded much of the redundant, unnecessary language proposed by the parties.”

Also of interest, the Court construed claim 2, which claimed “[t]he method of claim 1, wherein the method is implemented by an electronic provider-patient interface system (the ‘ePPi System’),” as being expressly limited to the preferred embodiment of the invention. The Court found that a person of ordinary skill in the art would regard “the ePPi system” as the entire invention claimed and thus incorporated into the claim the four functional components of the ePPi system as set forth in the specification.