Doc Pens New Chapter in Health IT

A Florida physician is using a high-tech, time-saving device that lets him digitally record detailed patient information, his own diagnostic drawings and personal notations in no time flat--a pen with benefits.

Dr. George Brick of Brandon, Fla., worked with two technology companies to develop the pen, which digitizes handwritten information and sends the data via Bluetooth into an electronic health record system. It solves a lot of problems for physicians such as Brick who need to implement an EHR but can't type.

"Every EHR I looked at required me to spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and the screens limited what I could document," Brick says in an article in tomorrow's Health Data Management magazine. "I'm used to drawing in my notes, using arrows to point to location and noting size and color of lesions, for example, and I just couldn't find a way to include that level of description in EHR screens."

The electronic pen saves him two hours a night reconciling documentation to insurance claims, and two hours a night for a billing clerk to key data into paper forms. In terms of workflow, he doesn't do anything.

The system uses paper forms imprinted with a nearly invisible dot pattern. The digital pen has an infrared camera on the tip that captures writing "as a series of map coordinates on the page," according to the magazine article. The pen sits in a docking station that converts the information it holds into standard keystroke digital data, including drawings and other images, and downloads that data into an EHR. A print-on-demand process automatically downloads patient identification information to ensure that forms reach patients' electronic folders.

Brick tells the magazine that new-patient registration now takes two minutes instead of 18. Time savings allow the two-physician practice to see 10 to 12 more patients a day, he says.

The system was developed in cooperation with Rover Technology Fusions of Tampa, Fla., and Anoto Inc., part of Anoto Group AB of Lund, Sweden.