Niche reseller Ubisys has integrated Anoto digital pen and paper technology with an NHS e-health system that could open the door to a roll-out to some 192,000 users nationwide.

Tarek Ghouri, managing director at the Wetherby, West Yorkshire-based integrator, said the six-week integration project would enable medical and paramedical staff such as nurses and physiotherapists to spend less time on administrative tasks.

“They need to report back centrally on what they have done, and they normally used pen and paper for that. This is also better than putting a tablet PC or notebook in front of a patient when they are upset,” he said.

Digital pen and paper,­ when integrated with the NHS’s TPP SystmOne centralised database, ­means healthcare staff do not have to change the way they work or their patient focus but can cut out the need for manual data entry of patient records.

Ghouri said SystmOne is the most widely used primary care database within the NHS’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT) and covered some 192,000 potential users for the Anoto technology,­ such as nurses and physiotherapists, who do not need full patient record access.

NPfIT will create one centralised record for each patient that all NHS providers can access, superceding the practice of different care providers each keeping their own separate patient records.

A similar Anoto deployment for Berlin healthcare firm Diakonie-Pflege Verbund by local partner Allpen has been praised.

Karl-Martin Seeberg, general manager of Diakonie-Pflege, said: “Caring for people means spending time with them.”