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Transparency in
Patent Examination Prosecution: Master Review Form
Guest blog by Deputy Commissioner for Patent Quality Valencia
Martin Wallace
One
important component of the USPTO’s commitment to achieve
greater accuracy, clarity, and consistency in examination and prosecution is
the Clarity and
Correctness Data Capture (CCDC) program. As part of our Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative, the goal of the CCDC is an improved data
capture system to enable all reviewers of finished work products to
consistently document and access quality review data in one place. By entering the results of these reviews into
a single database, the USPTO will ultimately capture three to five times more
data as a single data set than we have previously captured. With this larger data
set, we will be able to identify trends at a more granular level, and in doing
so, we will be poised to provide training and other educational opportunities to
examiners, in order to achieve greater transparency in examination and
prosecution. We are also updating our quality metrics in view of this new data,
which will be the subject of a future blog post.
As
part of this effort, the USPTO is standardizing reviews of finished work
products through the use of a single review form, called the “Master Review
Form” (MRF). Reviewers in the Office of Patent Quality Assurance (OPQA) and
supervisors in our technology centers are already using this form. The MRF
places a much greater emphasis on assessing the clarity of an examiner’s
reasoning in a rejection compared to past review forms, while maintaining our
historic focus on addressing the correctness of an examiner’s action. In
addition, the MRF provides reviewers with a greater ability to flag instances
of high quality or best practices during their reviews to allow the USPTO to
acknowledge these high-performing examiners as well as to provide a set of
readily identifiable examples of high quality work that can be used for
training purposes. Further, the Master Review Form is a “smart”, software-based
form, so reviewers see only those sections of the form that are pertinent to
the review that they are doing, which allows reviewers to be more efficient
when recording the results of their reviews.
We
are continuing to assess the Master Review Form to ensure it strikes the right
balance between the level of detail captured by the form and the time it takes
to fill out the form. To this end, we have conducted surveys and focus sessions
with OPQA reviewers as well as supervisors in the technology centers. These
surveys and focus sessions have identified changes to questions as well as a
need for better guidance on how to fill out the form. We also published a Federal Register
Notice
in March 2016 seeking comments on the MRF. We received 32 comments expressing a general
desire for more detail in the MRF’s sections to evaluate causal effects,
especially the search section, as well as identifying a need for a guidance
document for the public. Based on all of this feedback, we created a new
version of the Master Review Form, which OPQA and the
technology centers are currently using, and updated guidance for this new
version.
Further,
we are testing the MRF by using it when conducting case studies as part of the Topic Submission for
Case Studies
program. Historically, OPQA was able to conduct a very limited number of case
studies every year due to resource constraints because each case study
typically required a large number of extensive reviews. The Topic Submission
for Case Studies program has allowed us to test the extent to which we can use
data from the Master Review Form in place of such extensive reviews.
Even
though we only began using the Master Review Form in OPQA in November 2015, we
have completed over 11,000 reviews so far this fiscal year and expect to
complete at least another 1,000 reviews by the end of the year. In contrast,
OPQA completed 7,900 reviews in fiscal year 2015. Next fiscal year, OPQA expects to complete over
18,500 reviews. As the MRF’s database continues to grow over the coming years
with hundreds of thousands of reviews covering a large range of issues, the USPTO
will have an even richer data set to use when identifying quality trends,
answering questions we would otherwise have had to answer through a case study,
and providing more precise quality metrics. This will have an impact for years
to come.
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