PointClickCare subsidiaries Audacious Inquiry and Collective Medical Technologies filed a patent infringement lawsuit against health information exchange organization Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP) and CRISP Shared Services.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, alleges that CRISP and CRISP Shared Services (CSS) misappropriated Audacious Inquiry's intellectual property and engaged in "willful patent infringement" and deceptive practices in violation of Maryland's unfair competition law.
CRISP is a regional health information exchange (HIE) serving Maryland and five other states through shared services partnerships. CSS is a nonprofit organization providing localized health infrastructure and data exchange technology and services.
CRISP and CSS could not be immediately reached for comment about the lawsuit.
Electronic health records company PointClickCare acquired Collective Medical in 2020 and Audacious Inquiry, a national connected care platform that supports care coordination through data exchange, in 2022.
According to the lawsuit, Audacious helped pioneer the use of real-time event notification technology in patient care. The company's ENS solutions send alerts to a patient’s primary care physician or other members of a patient’s care team when a patient is admitted to a hospital, transferred to another facility or discharged.
In 2009, the company and CRISP began work jointly developing a special ADT alerting system called Encounter Notification Services (ENS). These services allow for proper care coordination and follow-up, and to prevent unnecessary hospital readmissions, among other advantages, PointClickCare wrote in the complaint.
Audacious collaborated with CRISP, and/or CSS "for years" to develop the ENS technology, the company said.
Audacious bought the full intellectual property rights to ENS and the underlying patents from CRISP in 2014.
From 2014 to 2024, CRISP licensed ENS back from Audacious—and from PointClickCare, following its acquisition of Audacious in 2022—through multiple agreements, the company said in the complaint.
A year ago, in May 2024, CRISP and CSS gave notice that it would terminate its licensing agreement with Audacious Inquiry/PointClickCare, effective September 1, 2024.
Almost immediately after giving notice that it would allow its license to lapse, CRISP and CSS launched a "copycat product" called CRISP Event Notification Delivery (CEND), PointClickCare alleges in the complaint. CRISP then began competing with PointClickCare in the marketplace.
PointClickCare alleges that CRISP's CEND technology infringes on three of its patents for its ENS solution and, by launching CEND, the company has violated Maryland’s Unfair Competition Law.
"Defendants’ brazen infringement is rooted in the misappropriation of Plaintiffs’ intellectual property regarding the product’s core functionality, which combines various vital healthcare encounter data streams into a single output and generates real-time notifications of those encounters." PointClickCare wrote in the lawsuit. "There is ample proof that further exposes Defendants’ improper leverage of their relationship with Plaintiffs—CSS touts CEND to potential customers as its ENS replacement while noting the main difference is its internally operated nature. Further, CSS intentionally misrepresents CEND’s capabilities by comingling and conflating statistics from ENS while marketing and selling CEND."
The company is demanding that the court award unspecified damages and enjoin CRISP and CSS from using its patented technology and from selling or using any Event Notification Service software covered by the three patents outlined in the complaint.
“We have filed suit to hold CRISP and Crisp Shared Services (CSS) accountable for patent infringement and deceptive practices that undermine fair competition. After licensing our technology for a decade, CRISP and CSS launched a copycat product based on our patented innovations and intellectual property. They are now marketing this infringing product, forcing us to compete for customers against our own technology. These blatant violations of federal and state law undermine market integrity and jeopardize the very underpinnings of vital healthcare innovation," a PointClickCare spokesperson said in a statement to Fierce Healthcare.
Along with the 29-page complaint, the company filed "a couple hundred pages" of claim charts demonstrating how CRISP is infringing on the company's patents, a PointClickCare spokesperson said.
The three patents in question cover the ENS technology that developed a specific way to send and receive information in the health information exchange that allows primary care providers and other medical professionals to get status updates in real-time, the spokesperson said. This is accomplished through the HL7 ecosystem.
PointClickCare claims it invested significantly in developing the ENS technology and CRISP's CEND product is negatively impacting its business by forcing the company to compete with a copycat product.
In the complaint, PointClickCare cites examples where CRISP has allegedly usurped its business by engaging in "unfair, abusive, or deceptive business practices."
Audacious had a contract with the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration, and, when that contract expired in 2024, AHCA issued an invitation to negotiate procurement. Audacious, along with three other companies, submitted replies to the AHCA procurement. In January, AHCA posted its intended award of the contract to CSS with the CEND technology as the basis for CSS’s bid.
PointClickCare alleges "CSS misrepresented the CEND system in its submission to AHCA by, among other things, deliberately obscuring the infringing nature of the technology, the volume of notifications it had made, the time period during which it was developed and used, and its ability to transition the Florida market to CSS’s infringing technology."
PointClickCare claims the case is about innovation and respecting other companies' intellectual property.
The company is also embroiled in an information blocking lawsuit with Real Time Medical Systems.
RTMS filed a lawsuit against PointClickCare in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland back in January 2024, alleging information blocking and other practices that substantially interfered with its business operations and harmed its facility customers.
PointClickCare filed a renewed motion to dismiss in June, arguing RTMS' case is built on "deficient" claims and that the company's allegation of unfair competition "fails" as a "matter of law," the company wrote in its motion to dismiss.