Many clinical staff tell me one thing they still rely on paper for is the ability to make freehand drawings. This could be to record clinical information in the health record as part of a clinic or admission note, or to help explain something to a patient.
Most traditional electronic clinical notes systems do not easily allow for this. However the technology already exists to achieve this.
Ideally a clinical IT solution for this would have the following properties:
Allow Freehand Drawing on a touch screen with stylus or finger to be included in the notes.
Allow this to be superimposed on top of other diagram templates (eg body outlines)
Still allow physical keyboards to be used for other parts of the form
Be able to be used on a variety of devices and operating systems
Is anyone using a system in NZ, or are you aware of any systems which would allow for this?
Good idea. Should be integrated sooner rather than later. My problem with drawing on a tablet is that my hand has to lean on the tablet
(like it does on paper) while I’m drawing or my tremor of intent makes a nonsense of what I’m drawing. That technology is quite recent. It’s too hard to draw on a surface and keep your hand elevated with only the stylus touching. This would have an impact
re the tablets that are already in use in health services.
Have you looked at Draw MD on iOS ? I find that useful, and it is free. I don’t know whether it is on Android or would allow physical keyboard use though, as I use it on my iPad. However, it would be possible to print out the drawings and then scan them to
add to an EHR.
No I don’t have any financial interest in the product or company.
Within WDHB we have this working - in 2 wards with the hope to roll out to all wards over the next few months
we use the ToastUI Image Editor (https://ui.toast.com) – which is open source and does exactly what you have asked for. For notes itself, we built it around the Froala editor, which works reasonably well; if we were doing it again we might use another product, but it does the job.
Looks like this - launched from patient context in clinical portal
A recent post in a GP forum suggested this as a really nice to have
“For consent imagine if we could open a field with a consent form and give the patient a hand held device and ‘pencil’ to sign it. No paper #sustainability”
Loved the idea is it possible and easy to do? Thanks Grahame
