INSERTING and REPLACING Anoto Digital Pen and Paper Technology Adoption Accelerating in Mainstream Healthcare Industry

Digital Pen and Paper Ideally Suited to New Era of Electronic Health Records

WESTBOROUGH, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In the second bulleted item, http://www.expedata.net/index.html should be embedded in the company name "ExpeData".

“A significant number of businesses today continue to rely on paper-based processes to capture information”

The corrected release reads:

Anoto Digital Pen and Paper Technology Adoption Accelerating in Mainstream Healthcare Industry

Digital Pen and Paper Ideally Suited to New Era of Electronic Health Records

Anoto Group, the worldwide leader in Digital Pen and Paper technology, today announced it is seeing significant momentum in healthcare across a range of areas including hospitals, ambulatory care and clinical trials. This momentum continues to establish Anoto technology as a flexible and easy-to-use mainstream data capture option with benefits for all types of healthcare applications. This is further confirmed by many new integrations, partnerships, and customer deployments involving Anoto technology.

Anoto partner Shareable Ink has completed numerous integrations with mainstream EHRs, including Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, McKesson, Meditech, and others, making digital pen technology available to a wide range of healthcare facilities worldwide.

In addition, a large number of new partnerships have been recently announced in the healthcare sector by Anoto and its partners. Some of those include:

• NextGen Healthcare, a leading provider of healthcare information systems and connectivity solutions, is aligning with Anoto to provide NextPen^tm, an innovative digital pen solution that quickly and accurately captures structured patient data directly from paper into a patient’s record in NextGen® Ambulatory EHR.
• Anoto partner ExpeData recently announced a joint venture with Nightingale Informatix, to launch “Clinipen”, an EMR-integrated digital pen solution within the North American market. Clinipen will be a major breakthrough in EMR data entry, as it will allow healthcare providers to continue using their current paper forms to document patient encounters and write prescriptions, making the transition from paper records to EMR as seamless as possible for physicians.
• Anoto partner Shareable Ink is working with Waiting Room Solutions to provide physicians with the easiest path to achieving Meaningful Use.
• Bayscribe is working with Anoto partner RoverINK™ to provide a clinical documentation application to address point of care data capture for EHRs while enforcing meaningful use criteria. The integration to Bayscribe includes the ability to reuse data, and perform clinical decision support via a Natural Language Processor for semantic search, as well as generate interoperable document formats such as CDA, CCD, and C32.
• H-DOX, a leading provider of web-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management Solutions, has also partnered with RoverINK and Bayscribe to provide customers a fully integrated data capture and clinical documentation solution.
• Intelligent Medical Objects® (IMO®) has also partnered with RoverINK to enhance Rover’s data capture and clinical documentation solution by offering coded data output using IMO’s Clinical Interface Terminology. IMO is the recognized leader in terminology management services and maintains terminology and coding updates for Rover which includes LOINC, SNO-MED, ICD, RxNorm, and CPT code sets directly available from the clinical note written using Anoto-based RoverINK.
• writeresult®, a provider of data management solutions for clinical research to the pharmaceutical/life sciences industry, has partnered with ExpeData to automate the process of capturing patient-reported outcomes during clinical trials with Anoto digital pen and paper technology. writeresult is able to provide rapid study start-up and deliver clean, ready-to-analyze PRO data to clients at database lock, resulting in faster, more accurate clinical trials and lower costs for sponsors.
• Integrated Document Solutions (IDS), a provider of cloud-based healthcare technology, has recently signed an agreement with Anoto partner ExpeData to integrate the EDW® digital writing platform within its web-based modular EHR offering.

Digital pen deployments in healthcare continue to expand across the U.S. New deployments include: NorthStar Anesthesia and Mobile Anesthesiologists (both deployed by Shareable Ink®); Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital and Bright Health Physicians (Allscripts™ customers utilizing Shareable Ink). Others include:

• Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is working with Anoto partner Forerun to utilize digital pen technology as part of their innovative charting solution called FlexChart™ for physicians in the emergency department. This technology combines the efficiency of chief complaint driven templates with the quality of electronic charting enabling the familiar capture of data onto a paper form at the bedside which is then exported into the FlexChart™ application. The solution supports both the physician’s need for speed and the hospital’s desire to capture clinical documentation data electronically.
• Lehigh Valley Health Network has successfully deployed T-System’s DigitalShare™ (powered by Shareable Ink) that allows clinicians to document patient care encounters on a familiar paper template while capturing the information electronically with a digital pen featuring Anoto functionality.
• Anoto partner BartCharts is working with Southern Maryland Hospital in Clinton, Maryland, to help their emergency department go digital through the use of complaint-based templates. These templates, enabled by digital pen technology, provide real-time physician feedback that drives good medical decision-making.
• River Park Hospital, a 125-bed full service hospital in McMinnville, Tenn., is working with Anoto partner Shareable Ink to utilize digital pen technology to document anesthesia care in a familiar way without losing productivity while simultaneously automating patient medical records.
• The Denver Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center (RMPDC) contracted with Anoto partner Kayentis, Inc. to utilize its Clin'Form digital pen technology in a web-based clinical trial.
• Health Essentials in California is a management services organization that oversees a family of companies including pharmacy, durable medical equipment (DME), post-acute, long-term care physician services and home health and hospices. They have deployed digital pen technology with Anoto partner ExpeData to enable continuous improvement of patient care and streamline e-communications.
• Public Health Surveys with the City of Nashua, N.H. Like many communities, Nashua collects, analyzes, and reports on public health survey data to prepare for and respond to emergencies. With Capturx Forms and Mapping solutions, survey data is easily collected on paper and instantly sent to the back office for analysis and emergency planning without the hours of delay and effort traditionally required to re-enter data by hand. “The pens were easy to use for the health surveys” says Ashley Conley, MS, CPH, Epidemiologist, Division of Public Health & Community Services.
• Clinical Trials with EmpiriStat. Clinicians capture large amounts of data on paper forms as part of clinical studies required by the FDA. With Capturx forms solutions, EmpiriStat clinicians instantly digitize their paper records, reducing the risk of missing paperwork and related issues with study tracking and compliance documentation.“EmpiriStat has maximized efficiency by reducing the paperwork, data entry time, and storage issues often associated with both paper based and electronic based studies,” says Nicole Close, PhD, President and Principal Biostatistician of EmpiriStat.

Today, 80 percent of physicians still rely on traditional pen and paper to capture patient information. The HITECH Act, part of the 2009 economic stimulus package, aims at inducing more physicians to adopt EHRs. The act promises maximum Medicaid and Medicare incentive payments to eligible professionals, hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs) as they adopt, implement, upgrade or demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHR technology. Digital pen and paper offers a simple, alternative way to capture data into EHR systems. The costs associated with training and workflow interruption are dramatically reduced when using a data capture method that is as easy to use as pen and paper. In addition, there is no intrusion into the doctor/patient communication that can result with other kinds of technologies.

“A significant number of businesses today continue to rely on paper-based processes to capture information,” said David Wood, Principal of the Mobile Document Capture Practice of Harvey Spencer Associates. “Healthcare in particular is under unique pressure to transition to electronic records. Digital pen and paper technology is a method that offers digitized information with minimal user retraining or technical expertise, reducing implementation costs and risks on the road to regulatory compliance.”

Anoto technology includes the Anoto digital pen and the Anoto dot pattern. The digital pen is Bluetooth enabled and has a tiny digital camera under the tip of the pen that takes pictures at 70 times per second as the user writes. When medical staff fills out paper forms, the handwritten information is recorded onto a chip in the digital pen. When the form is completed, the data in the pen is transferred via a USB docking station or through Bluetooth transmission. The handwritten information is converted into electronic data and uploaded into any of a wide variety of applications developed by Anoto partners. Usually handwriting recognition software is then applied. This translates the handwriting into machine-readable data which can then be imported easily into any EHR or other back-end systems.

“Healthcare professionals continue to struggle with digitizing the vast amounts of patient data they need to capture each day,” said Pietro Parravicini, CEO of Anoto, Inc. “Some have turned to tablet computing or laptops; however these solutions can be too complicated or too cumbersome because of the challenges associated with complex equipment, training, and support. 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.”

Links:

• Watch a short clip demonstrating how emergency responders and emergency room staff use the pen: Anoto Healthcare Video
• Download our healthcare white paper
• Learn about the benefits of digital pen and paper technology for healthcare at: www.anoto.com/healthcare and www.anoto.com/clinicaltrials

About Anoto Group

Anoto Group is the company behind and world leader in the unique technology for digital pen and paper, which enables fast and reliable conversion of handwritten text into digital format. Anoto operates through a global partner network that focuses on user-friendly forms solutions for efficient capture, transmission and storage of data within different business segments, e.g. healthcare, bank and finance, transport and logistics and education. The Anoto Group has around 80 employees, offices in Lund (head office), Boston and Tokyo. The Anoto share is listed on NASDAQ OMX Nordic small cap list under the ticker ANOT. For more information visit www.anoto.com.