Law360, New York (September 7, 2016, 7:29 PM EDT) — A California federal judge refused Wednesday to overturn a $12.3 million jury verdict against a UnitedHealth unit found to have infringed a patent for technology that measures doctors’ efficiency — but also refused the victorious plaintiff, Cave Consulting Group LLC, an injunction or an answer on ongoing royalties.
In March 2015, a jury awarded Cave more than $12.3 million, saying UnitedHealth Group Inc. unit OptumInsight Inc’s Impact Intelligence product infringed two claims of Cave’s patent for products that try to calculate doctor efficiency and also categorize patient health risk. The jury also rejected counterclaims that Cave software infringed an Optum patent.
Category: Patent
Virginia Mason Practices in the Appropriate Clinical Protocol Range for MRI of Spine Use in Diagnostics for Low Back Pain
SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CCGroup is pleased to announce that Virginia Mason Medical Center (Virginia Mason) in Seattle, Wash. continues to practice in the appropriate Clinical MedMarker™ Protocol Range for utilizing MRI of Spine in diagnostics for routine, non-complicated low back pain (LBP) patient episodes-of-care.
This news is not surprising to Robert Mecklenburg, MD, Medical Director of the Center for Healthcare Solutions at Virginia Mason. “In 2005, the medical center pursued efficiency in its spine clinic by adopting systems engineering methods of Toyota Motor Corp. As we published in the Wall Street Journal in 2007, back pain patients now follow a more standardized path. They have an initial combined visit with a physical therapist and a doctor,” Dr. Mecklenburg said. “We developed evidence-based decision rules and embedded them in the scheduling process for radiology. If the provider could not document the evidence-based indication for the imaging study on the scheduling screen, then the test could not be ordered.” He continued, “Within a year, the imaging rate of MRI of Spine decreased 23% across the enterprise.” Continue reading
CCGroup BullsEye™ and MedMarker™ Patent
Cave Consulting Group (“CCGroup”) Receives Patent on MedMarkers™ to Support Healthcare Provider Efficiency Scores
CCGroup is pleased to announce that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued Patent No. 8,301,464 on its CCGroup BullsEye™ methods of statistical analysis. The CCGroup BullsEye™ system targets those medical care services most associated with provider overall efficiency scores and provider medical condition-specific efficiency scores. Continue reading