Prosecution Insights
Prosecution Insights
Technology areas: Communications • Medical Devices & Mechanical Engineering
4 pending office actions • 3 art units • 4 examiners • 0 of 4 (0%) have an AI response strategy ready • 5 patents granted in the last 365 days
Oticon Medical A/S is managing 4 pending office actions in the Medical Devices & Mechanical Engineering technology area. These actions are distributed among 4 distinct examiners and 3 distinct art units. The busiest examiner is FISCHER, MARK L, who is responsible for 1 pending action. This spread across 3 distinct art units indicates a level of technical diversity in their pending applications. Because each of the 4 pending office actions is assigned to a different examiner, the company must manage multiple sets of examiner expectations and prosecution styles simultaneously.
The presence of 3 distinct art units suggests that the company's medical device innovations are being reviewed by several specialized technical groups at the USPTO. This distribution means that the prosecution risk is spread across different administrative units, rather than being concentrated in a single art unit. For practitioners, this requires a strategy that can adapt to the specific precedents and examination standards of the 3 distinct art units involved. With the workload split among 4 distinct examiners, the company's immediate patenting success is not dependent on any single individual, but rather on the outcomes of independent review processes. This lack of examiner concentration can lead to varying timelines for the pending office actions currently in the pipeline.
Based on the USPTO statutory response window for each pending office action. 2 of the docket's apps have a known mailing date; the rest are excluded from the tile counts.
Difficulty is derived from the rejection statutes on the most recent pending office action. §101-driven and multi-statute cases are graded Hard; §112-only and obviousness-type double-patenting cases are graded Easy; everything else is Medium. "Unknown" means we have not yet parsed a statute for that office action.
| Bucket | Cases |
|---|---|
| §103 only | 1 (25%) |
| Multi-statute (no §101) | 3 (75%) |
How the docket's pending cases split across USPTO tech-center bands.
Manual office-action response work runs about 10 hours per case. The time-saved bands below show what IP Author's prosecution pipeline typically delivers — a conservative 20% on the low end, 35% in the middle, 50% on the high end.
| Examiner | Apps on this docket | Allow rate | Interview lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| FISCHER, MARK L | 1 | 68.0% | +28.0% |
| JOHNSON, NICOLE F | 1 | 87.4% | +7.0% |
| DIETZ, NOE ROBERT | 1 | 0.0% | +0.0% |
| HONRATH, MARC D | 1 | 74.5% | +31.7% |
Cases in front of an examiner with an allow rate of 80%+ where the difficulty is Easy or Medium. The top 1 ordered by deadline are shown.
| App # | Title | Examiner | Due in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18606512 | IMPLANTABLE MEDICAL DEVICE COMPRISING A WIRELESS TRANSCUTANEOUS LINK | JOHNSON, NICOLE F | 3d overdue |
Multi-statute / §101-driven matters, or cases in front of an examiner with an allow rate under 30%. The top 3 ordered by deadline are shown.
| App # | Title | Examiner | Due in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17965484 | ELECTROMAGNETIC VIBRATOR FOR GENERATING A VIBRATION IN ORDER TO TRANSMIT SOUND THROUGH A BONE OF A SKULL OF A USER TO AN EAR OF THE USER AND A BONE ANCHORED HEARING DEVICE | DIETZ, NOE ROBERT | 23d |
| 18898165 | BONE ANCHORED HEARING IMPLANT DEVICE, HEARING DEVICE SYSTEM AND SIGNAL PROCESSING METHOD | FISCHER, MARK L | — |
| 17670079 | MEDICAL DEVICE | HONRATH, MARC D | — |
Cases in front of an examiner whose interview lift is 10 percentage points or more — i.e. interviewed cases historically resolve more favorably than non-interviewed ones. The top 2 ordered by deadline are shown.
| App # | Title | Examiner | Due in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18898165 | BONE ANCHORED HEARING IMPLANT DEVICE, HEARING DEVICE SYSTEM AND SIGNAL PROCESSING METHOD | FISCHER, MARK L | — |
| 17670079 | MEDICAL DEVICE | HONRATH, MARC D | — |
| Art Unit | Apps |
|---|---|
| 3791 | 2 |
| 2692 | 1 |
| 3796 | 1 |
| App # | Title | Examiner | Art Unit | Statutes | Status | Due in | AI | Filed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18898165 | BONE ANCHORED HEARING IMPLANT DEVICE, HEARING DEVICE SYSTEM AND SIGNAL PROCESSING METHOD | FISCHER, MARK L | 2692 | §103§112 | Non-Final OA | — | Pending | Sep 26, 2024 |
| 18606512 | IMPLANTABLE MEDICAL DEVICE COMPRISING A WIRELESS TRANSCUTANEOUS LINK | JOHNSON, NICOLE F | 3796 | §103 | Final Rejection | 3d overdue | Pending | Mar 15, 2024 |
| 17965484 | ELECTROMAGNETIC VIBRATOR FOR GENERATING A VIBRATION IN ORDER TO TRANSMIT SOUND THROUGH A BONE OF A SKULL OF A USER TO AN EAR OF THE USER AND A BONE ANCHORED HEARING DEVICE | DIETZ, NOE ROBERT | 3791 | §103§112 | Final Rejection | 23d | Pending | Oct 13, 2022 |
| 17670079 | MEDICAL DEVICE | HONRATH, MARC D | 3791 | §103§112 | Non-Final OA | — | Pending | Feb 11, 2022 |
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