Office of Patent Quality Assurance

The Office of Patent Quality Assurance (OPQA) is committed to ensuring the highest quality in patent examination.  To that end, our Office provides assessment and analysis of quality at the USPTO through work product reviews for compliance, clarity and best practices, defining and standardizing quality metrics and providing feedback to Technology Centers with respect to their reviews and training.  

Under the direction of the Acting Deputy Commissioner for Patents Brian Hanlon, OPQA functions to review the work of patent examiners; the majority of this work is completed by our 70+ Review Quality Assurance Specialists or RQASes.  RQASes are primary examiners with a proven history of high quality patent examination.  Organized by technical disciplines, RQASes are very familiar with the technology being reviewed, much like examiners in the Technology Centers under the Office of the Commissioner for Patents within patent application examination.  In addition to reviewers, OPQA has supervisors for each discipline (often referred to as Quality Leads), technical support staff, and administrative and program support staff to both facilitate the reviewers and accomplish other OPQA objectives.

OPQA focuses on accurate measures of patent quality.  Defining patent quality metrics is always evolving, and OPQA strives for continuous quality improvement.  Current quality metrics focuses on statutory compliance. 

In addition to patent quality metrics, the reviewing done in OPQA permits statistical analysis to better identify our training needs.  Our statisticians perform trend analysis on statutory compliance and clarity assessments to pinpoint which technologies need more guidance in applying patent law and which technologies can provide best practices to share.

Reviewing for statutory compliance is completed on a random assortment of work.  OPQA also completes other reviews to meet various objectives, such as to assess the effectiveness of a training class, to answer inquiries of a case study, or to evaluate the quality of the prior art search completed.

In addition to reviewing, OPQA in combination with our Chief Statistician’s Office at USPTO, administers internal and external quality surveys as tools to assess the perception of the quality of patent examination.  Results from such surveys are compared to statutory compliance statistics to ensure the perception of our quality is aligned with our metrics.  

We have had quality metrics based on independent reviews of Office actions since at least 1983.  Our initial reviews focused solely on allowances. Over time, we included additional types of reviews to provide a more thorough understanding of the quality of our work products and processes.

FY 1967    Quality Audit Program considers patents for statutory
                compliance, adherence to policy, and accuracy of
                classification

FY 1983    Review of Allowances begin (reviews occur prior to patent
                 grant)

FY 2005    Reviews of In-Process Office actions are added to allowance
                 reviews (includes finals and non-finals)

FY 2007    External Quality Surveys begin (to assess our stakeholders’
                 perception of quality)

FY 2008    Quality Index Reportings (QIR) (assessing the quality of our
                 processing)

FY 2010    Reviews grouped into Final Disposition (allowances and final
                 rejections) and In-Process (non-final rejections)

FY 2011    Quality Composite Score begins – combining seven (7)
                 individual quality metrics.  

1. In-Process Compliance Rate*
2. Final Disposition Compliance Rate*
3. Complete First Action on the Merits Review
4. First Action on the Merits Search Review
5. QIR (average of actions per disposal: RCEs as percent of total disposals; reopenings after final; second action non-finals; and restrictions after first action)
6. External Quality Survey
7. Internal Quality Survey

*Measuring compliance considering an Office action's ability to advance prosecution

FY 2016   Quality Metrics Program begins (composite score retired) to
                simplify metrics into three (3) categories:

1. Product indicators (focused on statutory compliance and clarity of Office action)*
2. Process indicators (focused on QIR-type data)
3. Perception indicators (focused on survey data)

*Measuring compliance considering an Office action's adherence to the criteria of compliance under each statutory basis

FY 2020   Product indicators begun in FY16 now focus more on (a) statutory
                compliance, to inform our quality metrics, and (b) best practices,
                to encourage activities we have found to be drivers of clarity and correctness.

Email inquiries:

About the OPQA, OPQA@uspto.gov.
Quality metrics, QualityMetrics@uspto.gov.  
Patent quality, PatentQuality@uspto.gov.

For resources related to patent legal administration (i.e., USPTO Federal Register Notices, Patent Laws and Rules, MPEP, and all USPTO patent examination training materials), go to Patent Legal Administration.