PMD March 2005: Announcing the PedREST
In 2004 Pediatric Medical received notice that we were going to be granted our first patent – YEAH!!! We were finally ready to share our “creation” with the world
Our first opportunity came in March 2005 with something called the LifeSavers Conference. For those of you not familiar with it, Lifesavers is the premier national highway safety meeting in the United States dedicated to reducing the tragic toll of deaths and injuries on our nation’s roadways… The conference addresses a wide range of safety topics, from child passenger safety and occupant protection to roadway and vehicle safety and technology. It offers the latest information on advances in highway safety, 
highlights successful programs and draws attention to emerging safety issues.” It was to be held that year in North Carolina and seemed like the perfect place to “showcase” our new device. They even had a workshop scheduled on “transporting children on ambulances” being run by Dr. Marilyn Bull of Riley’s Children’s Hospital – well known for her work on ambulance safety. And for the icing on the cake – I had family in Charlotte – so I could attend the conference without having to rent a hotel room.
I made arrangements to attend the conference and not too long after drove to North Carolina for breakfast with my mother’s cousin and his girlfriend who worked for Britax (one of the most well-respected manufactures of child seats in the world – seriously what a coup)! Later that afternoon I met her over at the conference and she introduced me to the Britax folks in charge of new business development – who took one look at what we had and introduced us to SnugSeat – the company they partnered with to manufacture “specialty child seats”. Oh, and before I forget, while we were still at the Britax booth, some local EMS guys stopped by, saw our demo, and asked where they could get one. Can you say happy as a pig xxx xxxx??? (I’ll let you fill in the blanks)
Later that afternoon I attended the workshop on safe ambulance transport for kids. Unfortunately Dr Bull had been taken ill and could not attend herself – however her colleagues (Dr Judith Talty and Shayne Merritt) gave the presentation on her behalf. Their conclusion – which was no surprise to anyone, especially me – was that there really were no safe ways to transport little kids and that they hoped manufacturers would change this for the future.
At this point – totally “jazzed” – I waited until after the session and spoke with Dr Talty and Shayne. Both were floored by the PedREST presentation and asked me to please keep in touch and forward whatever I could to Dr Bull. Flying high I made the rounds of the other child seat manufacturers attending the conference (Graco, Evenflo, etc.) and finally, exhausted, headed for home.
5 days later I headed to Philadelphia for the EMS Today conference and there met with the top “players” in the EMS industry – Stryker, Ferno, Laerdal, Microtek Medical, Allied Health, etc. The response was tremendous, and the offers of encouragement and support, overwhelming! The PedREST was a hit!
Two weeks later, the following email arrived from Shayne Merritt:
Stephanie,
We will be passing this information on to Dr. Bull. In the meantime, if you have any photos or schematics that you could send for Dr. Bull, that would be helpful.
Your product is very intriguing and exciting since it’s success would fill an important need.
Shayne
As I look back on all of this, I can’t help but smile when I think about how on top of the world we were. The people we met…the welcome we received. I couldn’t have imagined a better way to start the next phase of our journey! Little did I know how much more of a journey lay ahead. To me, at that moment, the PedREST had officially arrived…
Until next time…
PMD 2004: And After Every Rain…A Rainbow
As you can probably tell, 2004 was a bit of a rollercoaster. And trust me when I say that after that disaster of a weekend, I was seriously ready for the cart to start rolling uphill again.
Sure enough Monday afternoon found us on a conference call with the examiner from the US patent office. See our patent had been already gone through 3 office actions and things were getting a little frustrating (not to mention expensive) so we decided to speak directly to the examiner to see if we could understand the rationale behind what he would and wouldn’t approve. Now having gone through this process several times, I feel obliged to tell you that unfortunately, in all likelihood a call like this will probably not leave you with a better understanding of how your examiner thinks. What it can do however is provide you with insight into the one or two words or phrases that your examiner has a conflict with….and that can make all the difference in the world. Case in point:
Our call began with our examiner showing us the “prior art” (i.e. other existing patents filed before ours) that he believed we would infringe upon with our current claim language. We went back and forth over a couple of minor points, made some small changes and then sat down to discuss what he considered to be the one “obstacle” we hadn’t yet overcome: a portable surgery tray that attached to a stretcher and kept the medical instruments secure – OR – as far as we could see – a cafeteria lunch tray with a strap running across it. (note – those of you who’ve been through this process are no-doubt chuckling because you’ve “lived the dream” of bizarre prior art references – for those of you whose jaws just hit the table, know that ours did too and we hadn’t even gotten to the best part).
We were quiet for a second and then our patent attorney who had joined us in the call proceeded to ask very calmly how the examiner thought this could be used to secure a child for safe transport to a hospital. His answer – no joke – “well you could tape a baby to that tray”.
The silence was deafening…I mean seriously, how do you counter that??? Finally, after what seemed like minutes (ok, really only seconds) of silence I made a decision. No amount of intelligent discussion / arguing was going to change his opinion. I just needed to know where in his opinion we had gone wrong so that we could fix it. So I sucked it up and asked…and to my surprise, he told me. Not long after that we filed our final response with the USPTO.
For weeks I checked PAIR (the Patent Application Information Retrieval system for the USPTO) daily hoping for some kind of sign that we were finally done. Thanksgiving morning (…and yes it really was Thanksgiving) I got one – our official “Notice of Allowance” was posted. 
I could follow this part of the story with a section on “what I learned” but I feel pretty confident that you all can figure that out on your own. I will say that after what felt like a torrential downpour I finally got my rainbow…
Until next time…with love from the “tape a baby corporation”
PMD: 2004 – Repeat After Me…Must Have CIP
By the end of 2003, we had received our first office action from the US patent office (USPTO), and filed an international PCT. Our attorney notified us that we would probably receive 2 more office actions before we were through and we should have our patent confirmed within 12 months – 17 on the outside.
Now for those of you beginning the patent process, I feel obligated to tell you that the words “office action” will likely become the bane of your existence. For reasons too numerous to count, it is almost unheard of that a patent will be approved when it is first submitted. But on a positive note, you’ll have a chance to improve your patent claims making your own patent stronger and more difficult to infringe. The downside is cost, so be prepared for this and budget in advance.
By March, we had filed our 2nd office action response as well as a “Continuation in Part”. It is here that I need to pause. A Continuation in Part or CIP is typically filed to add some new feature and/or better clarify some existing feature(s) previously disclosed – what it boils down to is that you have, for all intents and purposes, open claims on file with the patent office. It makes it very difficult for someone to take your patent – look for features you didn’t claim – and then design around it.
BTW – this is not a secret…big companies everywhere have been doing this for years to protect their intellectual property from other companies that might try to “borrow” their ideas. It’s us little guys – the individual inventors – that don’t know this…but we NEED to! I have made a commitment and intend to honor it that if / when the PedREST makes it out to the market, I will take the next 6 months off to teach small inventors everywhere the mantra I repeat regularly: “Must Have CIP”.
In fact there were 2 key lessons that I’d like to share with any of you thinking about starting this process:
- First…it requires a little extra paperwork (and funds), but if possible, when you file your patent application, file it in a way that DOES NOT allow it to be published until it is granted.
- Second…at some point before your patent is finalized, search your specs for features you did not initially claim and any additional design modifications you’d like to make and FILE A CIP.
We didn’t do the first…fortunately for us, we did the second… And it saved us… Trust me when I say there will be more to come on this, but for now hopefully these 2 lessons will save you from some of the heartache my sister and I were soon to experience.
Until next time…
PMD 1999–2003: Learning to Walk
As I mentioned in my last PedREST post …by 1999 we had the first set of engineered “concept drawings” of our Pediatric Emergency Transport System – a.k.a. PETS. Our company was in what could probably best be described as a “toddler phase” – we were learning to walk before we could run – and walking meant refining our drawings and “officially” beginning the patent process.
I won’t bore you with all the details of the process we went through to create our patent (although for any of you starting this process, I’m happy to answer questions). Suffice it to say that we did a “prior art” search to make sure we wouldn’t overlap anyone else’s concepts and then worked with our attorneys to draft a patent that described in detail why the EMS community needed the PETS to save kids’ lives. There were multiple changes – both to the document and to the attorneys we were working with – but in the end, by September of 2001, Pediatric Medical had filed for its first U.S. patent. :)
By 2002 things had started to pick up speed. A talented graphic artist / friend of mine by the name of Pete McKay created some logo options for us:
I met with a close family friend who was interested in helping us launch the product. With her on our side there was no way this couldn’t succeed. In business, she was a force to be reckoned with… to me, she was a mentor and a friend. …AND she wanted to help!
I emailed her our logo options and she responded – she HATED the name. Unbelievably frustrating (we loved it)…but unfortunately she had a point. People would either pronounce our name as “pets” or “peets” and neither really worked to our advantage or conveyed anything at all to do with child health or safety. I honestly couldn’t believe I had missed that, but really it’s very easy to get tunnel vision when you focus so intensely on something like this. Sometimes you need an objective opinion to see the forest through the trees.
So, point taken – lesson learned – and off we went to find a new name. By January of 2003 we had it: PedREST, a Pediatric Rapid Emergency Transport System AND a place for Peds patients to REST). It said it all and we were off and running…
Until next time…
Making Changes for Safety
Now that we had 3-Dimensional pictures, it enabled us to make any necessary changes to make transporting children the safest way possible…
The most important one was going from a 3-POINT HARNESS…or this
to this…a 5-POINT HARNESS that allowed for a single strap to be detached rather than the entire harness, so if necessary it would allow a medical technician access to injuries without risking a child’s safety
Another change of critical importance was ADDING A BACKBOARD specifically designed to fit this seat. EMS personnel needed to be able to safely immobilize and transport a child with severe head or neck injuries to an emergency care facility, transfer the injured child into their care and then depart to handle the next emergency. Without a backboard, we soon discovered this was not possible. The child could be secured directly to the device, but then the device would need to remain behind…along with all the pediatric medical supplies stored in its compartments. The safest path for the child and best for the EMS staff was for us to add a backboard to the design…so that’s what we did.
