Tesla Motors and the value of patents

This past summer, Tesla Motors made waves in the automotive industry by symbolically taking down its wall of electric car patents and issuing an invitation for competitors to borrow from their innovations. The gesture was presumably to garner greater interest in the electric car market, a market which Tesla alone may not be able to sustain. DOTmed asked Betten, who was once an IT analyst with experience in medical industry patents and intellectual property, if that philosophy of patent sharing could benefit interoperability in the health care industry.


"If something like that happened in the pharmaceutical industry, the results would be absolutely huge," said Betten. For medical devices however, he thinks the implications are marginal. To make his point, he made an example of cardiovascular competitors.

"For years there has been an issue with implanted cardiology devices; defibrillators and pacemakers," said Betten, "A good acquaintance of mine always says: I want one programmer and one controller to talk to all these implanted devices." Patents don't stand in the way of that, it's a business issue.

"The big manufacturers; Boston Scientific, Medtronic, and St. Jude, all hate making controllers," said Betten. It doesn't add a lot of value to their business, so there would be great incentive to collaborate on one controller that makes life easier for the doctors, the sales people, the programmers, etc. "But it hasn't happened," said Betten, "And not because of IT issues but because of business constraints; you can't get anybody to break that chain."

Betten points to the number of products sold in the medical industry and contrasts it with the millions and millions of cell phones, TVs, and automobiles sold in the consumer space. With medical devices, "The high value is associated with the procedure and reimbursement, not the device itself," said Betten.

Patents versus regulations

"Patents are all about novelty," said Betten, "I've got this neat new thing I'm doing that nobody has done before so give me a patent. In the regulatory world, however, you try to align your device with ones that came before it. So, there's a disconnect between the drive to be novel, and the drive from a regulatory perspective to make sure you've got a predicate that you can point to, to make the process easier."

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