Healthcare Review

Nashua, NH – Last year’s H1N1 virus made it painfully clear that public health officials need to shorten the “data collection” timeline so they can identify and act on serious virus outbreaks as quickly as possible. As you may recall, delays in understanding the spread of H1N1 last year led to widespread vaccine shortages and a surplus of fear among the public as H1N1 dominated the headlines throughout the entire cold and flu season.
 
Nashua, NH is aggressively tackling this problem by using a new kind of technology to capture health information in the field: digital pen and paper. Like many municipalities, Nashua faces a shortage of epidemiologists in local health agencies, so in addition to digital pen and paper technology, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have released a newly developed Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response (CASPER) toolkit to help public health professionals collect pertinent health information during a large-scale emergency or natural disaster. The CDC is encouraging local public health agencies to adopt the CASPER protocol to better prepare for and respond to future emergencies by increasing their capability to quickly establish surveillance systems during disasters.
 
Nashua is one of the first cities in New Hampshire to use these practices in a full-fledged effort to survey their community’s health and wellness. Although protocol is outlined by the CDC, finding an efficient way to turn handwritten survey information into reports for review and action was a challenge. After exploring methods to collect and synthesize data, Nashua began using digital pen and paper technology in order to allow survey teams to use familiar pen and paper survey forms and route maps.
 
With this system, teams can still fill out the paper-based health surveys and mark which homes they’ve visited on a map. The digital pen creates both a normal ink record on the paper and also makes a digital copy that’s stored in the pen’s memory. When the pen is connected to a PC, all the recorded data is immediately integrated to back-end systems, which increases accuracy, saves significant time and allows for immediate information availability.