August 24th 2023.
George McKinney, the Black tech founder, has been embroiled in a legal battle with Kaiser Permanente for the past five years over patent violations. According to Houston Style Magazine, McKinney sued the company for $50 million in 2018 and claimed that they had stolen trade secrets from his company, Better Life Technologies Group.
McKinney had signed an NDA with Kaiser Permanente in 2012 to form a sister company, VIQUAL Medical, which was to be the medical device division of Better Life Technologies. Therefore, Kaiser Permanente had agreed not to share any intellectual property or trade secrets they received from VIQUAL. Better Life Technologies had high hopes of launching their products with the deal.
In 2018, McKinney told Houston Style that “One of our company’s objectives has always been to show the world that if the doors of diversity could open ever so slightly, the African American science community has powerful technological developments that can have a huge impact on science and technology.”
McKinney and his fellow founders believe that their innovations have been used in Kaiser Permanente’s healthcare application IOT and maintain that the breach of contract has resulted in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for VIQUAL.
When discussing the issue with Black News on Aug. 21, McKinney connected their long struggle against Permanente Kaiser with the buried history of Black inventors and inventions. He said “The theft of African American music, ideas, real property, and intellectual property has been integrated into American culture for years. How many times have we heard about the Black man or woman who has a great idea, something special, but after disclosing it, has found that the idea now belongs to someone else? Our history is replete with innovations, technologies, and patentable ideas that never saw the light of day because they were stolen.”
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