I looked over the patent and don't understand how the patent was granted. There is much prior
art in this area including standards from the OMG, where the patient identifier (which can be
I discussed this with Andrew some time ago. In fact we already used this separation of information in order to protect confidential data in almost literally the same way as his patent in ~ 1986 (?, maybe even earlier) at the Technical University of Munich for cardiol. study data. No paper was written re this method since we regarded this as a marginal detail and though it was something self-evident, prbably used long before we implemented our own version.
Won't be defensible at least in Europe, I'd expect.
Anyway, doesn't matter: in Germany at that time, only *devices* were patentable. No ideas, no algorithms, only concrete devices where you could actually demonstrate a prototype. This reasonable principle has sadly been watered down in recent years.
Horst
