Are patents going to impact how doctors treat a patient?

Today Ars Technica reported on a case before the US Supreme Court and how the court is assuming that the usage of scientific data, which has been publish, is a valid patent. This is a pretty scary scenario. What do you mean? Well, the patent is related to how the levels of some chemical impact the dosage of a drug. That's it. If you have level X in your blood you should have dosage Y. The patent holder created a device to test the level of the chemical in your blood which then suggests a dosage level. The Mayo clinic developed their own test and  have been administering the test on their own without paying anything to the company. The arguments in the court essentially assume that this is a valid patent.

Should this patent be valid though? Seems like something that could be patented. Based on what is considered patentable, this should fall under mathematical formulas. Essentially, this is a matter of correlation and basic regression analysis. During a drug trial you can determine a correlation between the impact of a dosage of a drug on the current level resulting in a lower level of the chemical. This is really how all medicine works. If you can reduce costs by creating your own tests and administering it yourself then that's great. Hospitals should be encouraged to do this if they are large enough.

This is what Doctors do. They read literature about the medicine the condition it's supposed to impact and what sort of connection there is with the dosage levels and the response rate within the patients. Every doctor has to use a test to determine the level of a chemical or some condition. This can be the pulse (irregular heartbeats), blood pressure (pressure cuffs), blood sugar (A1 test) and the list goes on. In each case the doctor is able to assign a proper dosage prescription based on the study of patients. If a doctor was required to pay a licensing fee for each and every case of this our currently exorbitant costs of health care will seem cheap. Like when we used to complain about $1.50/gallon for gas.

The other problem with patenting something like this is that it's likely to be highly unenforceable except for when a large institution like the Mayo Clinic. Individual practitioners will be safer than large clinics, but they could be impacted as well. If they are required to use an extremely expensive proprietary testing methodology rather than have the ability to use any testing method it will drive up prices and may put doctors out of business.

If the court rules on this as if these types of patents are valid, we will need to push to have patent law changed again. The last change moved things in general, in the right direction but a lot more work needs to be done.