Anoto says its digital pen technology is more popular than ever, helping docs bridge the gap between paper and EHRs
WESTBOROUGH, MA — "It's no longer a niche or specialty thing," says Ginny Carpenter vice president of marketing for North America at Anoto, about her firm's pioneering digital pen technology. "Its right there on the list of the other data-capture options healthcare facilities might consider, like tablets or laptops or voice recognition."
The push to switch to EHRs is stronger than ever. Yet "despite pressures – carrot and stick – to go electronic," a full 80 percent of docs still rely on paper-based jottings. Carpenter says digital pens are an attractive alternative way of capturing data that can then be imported into EHR systems.
"It's a significant endeavor to adopt an EHR system, including completely changing how doctors capture their data," says Carpenter. In addition to that upheaval of established workflow, add expensive training, disruptive downtime and, sometimes, decreased accuracy.
"We believe our technology helps ease that transition," she says. "From a user's point of view, they really don't change their process at all. They don't change the form they've been filling out, or what they've been doing all day. They just change the pen that they've been using." In addition to minimizing distractions to physician/patient interaction, the pens are "extremely mobile, but without issues of security or durability."
Anoto Group, headquartered in Lund, Sweden, has about 300 patents worldwide – it operates on a licensing and royalty model, contracting out to partners who develop their own applications using its core technology. You may be more familiar with brands such as Nashville, Tenn.-based Shareable Ink, Miamisburg, Ohio-based ExpeData, Washington-based Bart Charts or Tampa, Fla.-based RoverINK. All are Anoto partners. "If it's a digital pen, there's a 95 percent chance it's Anoto technology," says Carpenter.
The way it works is deceptively simple. There are two components: the pen itself, which looks and acts like a standard-issue (if stylish) ballpoint pen, and the patented Anoto dot pattern, which can be printed on any standard paper. Inside the pen is a tiny digital camera that takes pictures, 70 times per second, as the user is writing.
"What the pen is taking a picture of – this makes it very accurate – is the Anoto dot pattern," says Carpenter. "To the naked eye, it looks like a faint gray background. But it's a complicated matrix of strategically placed dots that form X-Y coordinates that the pen is reading constantly, allowing the pen to know where on the page the user is writing."
That data is stored inside the pen – up to 200 pages at a time – and can then be transmitted, via USB or Bluetooth, to a variety of apps developed by Anoto partners. Thereafter, handwriting recognition software is usually applied, translating the scribbles into machine-readable data, which can be imported into EHRs or other back-end health IT systems.
“Healthcare in particular is under unique pressure to transition to electronic records," says David Wood, principal of the mobile document capture practice of New York-based IT firm Harvey Spencer Associates, noting that Anoto's pens offer "digitized information with minimal user retraining or technical expertise, reducing implementation costs and risks on the road to regulatory compliance.”
Lately, says Carpenter, there's been a huge uptick in clinical usage of technologies from Anoto partners. "It's taken time for our partners to develop applications that make sense for the various healthcare sectors," she says. "Now we're starting to see the fruits of their labor."
Shareable Ink, for instance, has already integrated with EHRs from vendors such as <a href="/directory/allscripts" target="_blank" class="directory-item-link">Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, McKesson, Meditech and more. A notable group of Shareable Ink users are anesthesiologists, who traditionally can be "very heavily paper-based and notoriously resistant to moving away from paper processes," says Carpenter.
One such recent deployment was at Mobile Anesthesiologists a Chicago ambulatory anesthesia practice, which expanded its use of Shareable Ink's Anesthesia Suite. David Barinholtz, MD, president and CEO of Mobile Anesthesiologists, called it the "ultimate mobile data capture solution,” noting “our providers can now capture clinical documentation in every care setting they visit, without changing workflow or compromising productivity.”
Emergency room deployments, from vendors such as Waltham, Mass.-base Forerun, which integrates Anoto pens with its FlexChart clinical documentation system, are another new front. "ERs are kind of separate animals from other healthcare practices," Carpenter points out. "We've seen that our technology is one of the only realistic ways for physicians to capture the data they need in an effective way, and still be treating patients in an emergency room environment."
Other places Anoto pens have been popping up in healthcare include Nashua, N.H. whose public health department uses forms from Seattle-based Adapx to take down survey data on paper and instantly relay it back to the office for analysis and emergency planning. NextGen Healthcare has developed NextPen, a digital tool that accurately captures structured patient data directly from paper into a patient’s NextGen ambulatory EHR. A joint venture between ExpeData and Markham, Ontario-based EMR vendor Nightingale Informatix has resulted in the new Clinipen, an EMR-integrated digital pen solution.
“Healthcare professionals continue to struggle with digitizing the vast amounts of patient data they need to capture each day,” said Pietro Parravicini, Anoto's CEO. “Having to overhaul how physicians do their work day-to-day is a major barrier to EHR adoption. With Anoto digital pen technology, physicians can adopt an EHR solution by just changing the pen they are using.”
