Posts Tagged: "Advisory Committee on Genetics Health and Society"

Interoperability in electronic health records between VA, DoD the subject of Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing

The VA announced this April that its EHR system had reached certification for interoperability, months after the DoD had reached the same milestone, but investigators at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reached a different conclusion. A recent GAO report indicated that, although the goal of true interoperability between the agencies can be met within two years according to agency planning, the two systems weren’t truly interoperable… It’s in this environment, heavily tinged by the recent GAO report, that a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations came together to take a closer look at what was being done by the VA and the DoD to reach true interoperability.

Steve Brachmann

July 23, 2016

PTO Report on Confirmatory Genetic Testing: A Worthwhile Effort But Not Far Enough

The USPTO has released its ‘Report on Confirmatory Genetic Diagnostic Testing,’ which was prepared to fulfill the requirements of §27 of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. The USPTO did make an interesting observation that has been reflected in its patent examining guidelines. The USPTO Report concludes that ‘it is unlikely that exclusive provision of a diagnostic test, whether for an original diagnosis or to confirm the original result, will be possible based on patenting and licensing behavior.’ This statement reinforces the USPTO’s prior broad interpretations of the Court’s findings in Mayo and Myriad. Of note is that in the USPTO Report, the USPTO adopts the Supreme Court’s factually and scientifically unsupported distinction between genomic DNA and cDNA.

Brian R. Stanton, Ph.D.

October 11, 2015