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Question regarding a patent

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jskudera

Junior Member
I have been exploring a business opportunity that deals with contract management for hospitals. here are some of the basics:

1. my company would engage with the hospital and obtain copies of all agreements
2. my company would then scan and upload contracts in PDF format to a database (along with specific fields, such as effective date, expiration date, etc)
3. hospital would have easy access to all their contracts in one central location (through the website)
4. hospital could generate custom reports based on fields entered from the contract

It's pretty basic as far as methodology goes. There is a company, MediTract, that claims they have a "patented" process. Can something that 'basic' be patented? I pulled up their patent:

US Patent # 7,194,677. Method and system to convert paper documents to electronic documents and manage the electronic documents - Patents.com

By reading the abstract, it appears they may have developed software to take the scanned contract (in PDF format), and put it through their software that converts it to text, and allows for searchable fields, in addition to creating bookmarked sections on the file.

Before I start investing time and money in to developing something, I just wanted to seek some 'free' legal advice to see if the process I'm taking conflicts with their patent.
 



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