Great savings with a digital pen

Taking notes on paper that go straight into the patient record. Petter Ericson believes that this makes life easier for the home help and saves money for the municipalities. Photo: Jan Fredrik Frantzen, NST.

- "We started by creating a digital pen with a camera, which you could run over a text to read it, for example to translate something," explains the man behind the pen technology, Petter Ericson in the Swedish technology company Anoto.

This led to a new product — a pen that records which you write and converts it to text in a digital document, which goes straight into the patient record when you connect it to a PC.

Minimal training

- "There may be high turnover in the home-care service, and with this system you do not have to train the home help in new technology when they start. Everyone is comfortable with using pen and paper."

In a typical working day, the staff will collect the work plan for the day and a pen like this at the office, before they drive out on their rounds to patients. At the patient's home, they run the pen over a chip positioned at the door. The built-in clock then registers that the home help has arrived.

After they have completed the tasks they are to do, such as changing bedlinen or cleaning the floors, they check off a form that the patient keeps before running the pen over the chip at the door again.

Great savings for the municipality

- "In this way, time usage is recorded, and the home-care service can assess whether some patients need more visits during the week, if they can see that the staff spend longer with one patient than with another, or if it emerges that they need more help than they did before."

When the working day is over and the staff return to the office, they place the pen in a docking station connected to a PC which reads the content that has been entered during the day. And the staff do not have to sit and wait for an available PC.

- "The municipality of Solna outside Stockholm introduced this technology in 2005. They say that it saves them about EUR 100,000 a month in reduced salary costs and training," says Ericson.

The Swedish municipality has a population of nearly 70,000, and has outsourced the home-care service on the basis of tenders. With the new system, the municipality can see how much time is spent with the older people, and they pay only for this time.

You can read more about this technology on the website of the technology company Anoto in Sweden.

For more information, please contact the Head of Information, Hilde Pettersen, mobile telephone +47 991 03 794.

Facts about TTeC 2007:

The Tromsø Telemedicine and eHealth Conference takes place from 11 to 13 June 2007. This is the seventh time that the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine in Tromsø is organizing the conference, which gathers several hundred participants from 20 countries over three days. This year's conference focuses on new, non-traditional possibilities for improving the efficiency of the care service and reducing the burden on the public health service when the grey wave begins in earnest within a few years.