Rotherham physios flex digital pens

Rotherham Community Health Services has introduced digital pen and paper and increased the productivity of its physiotherapists by 35%.

The community provider arm of NHS Rotherham said the use of Ubisys’s Anoto Digital Pen and Paper by physiotherapists was helping to meet its objectives for a complete care record and increase productivity and efficiency.

The provider uses TPP’s SystmOne for its electronic patient records and said it decided to trial the digital pen and paper with physiotherapists who needed to capture notes, data and diagrams at speed while in a consultation with patients.

Paul Chapman, clinical lead for IT and a physiotherapist, said therapists were finding use of the keyboard desktop solution slowed down sessions by an estimated 40 minutes, the equivalent of not seeing two new patients per day.

He added: “We trialled digital pens and quickly discovered that not only were we able to recover the 40 minutes per session lost through administration for new patients, but it also helped us to increase consultation time with existing patients by 15%.

“The time savings are derived from the ability to conduct the clinic more efficiently through recording profession clinical specific information which in turn complements the electronic information held in SystmOne giving a complete clinical record.”

Chapman said Rotherham Community Health Services now plans to introduce further integration as part of phase two of the project. He said it hoped this would deliver more patient time and better outcomes, supporting the Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) agenda.

Alan Meloy, deputy head of IT at NHS Rotherham, said the benefits of the deployment had been clear and measurable. He added: “From an IT perspective the solution delivers quickly and does not demand a large internal support overhead which helps me maximise our IT resources.”

Tarek Ghouri, managing director of Ubisys, said: “These gains are typical of what we see from deployments across the social and health care sectors, an area in which we specialise. We are looking forward to rolling out to more services within Rotherham and securing a further nine trusts in the next few weeks”