The cost of the NextPen varies, based on how many you buy. The start-up cost for one NextPen is about $1,385—which includes $1,000 in software licensing fees, plus the pen hardware and other fees of $385, Feague says.
“The pen doesn’t actually know which patient it is, the pen just knows that it sees a certain dot pattern,” he says.
Plus, patients and doctors accustomed to using pen and paper don’t feel as though they’re doing anything unusual, Dr. Goodman says.
He says there has been little difficulty in having patients use the technology.
“They don’t realize what they’re doing. They’re filling out a sheet of paper like they would in any doctor’s office,” he says. “So it’s not difficult for a patient to interface with your electronic health record because they’re using tools that they’re used to, which are a pen and a piece of paper.”
Anoto marketing director Virginia Carpenter says that’s been one of the draws for doctors wanting to use the pens to transition to EHR. She says she’s heard that doctors are not so much scared off by the cost of transitioning, but the interruption of workflow.
It’s not difficult for a patient to interface with your electronic health record because they’re using tools that they’re used to, which are a pen and a piece of paper.
—Steven Goodman, MD
“Bringing tablets or laptops in, training staff on how to navigate through the screens—the whole new way of doing the process when they’ve been doing something else probably for a long time,” she says. “The beauty of our technology is that there really is no workflow interruption from a user’s point of view.”
Dr. Goodman has found that to be the case—and he has saved money, compared to the $100,000 some companies wanted to convert the office’s thousands of paper files to PDFs.
“You can have the patient fill out a form and put their information in there for you,” he says. “What a cost savings.”
