It looks like pen and paper but acts like a computer keyboard ... Shareable Ink allows clinicians to document in a natural manner while still capturing data electronically.

Building an Innovative and Practical HIT Application

Several months ago, Shareable Ink, an innovative healthcare technology firm, repositioned itself in Tennessee, migrating from a high tech Boston neighborhood to Nashville.

More than $4.5 million in funding from a consortium of experienced Nashville investors was enough to convince entrepreneur Stephen Hau and colleagues that this southern healthcare center could look like home. Hau noted, “I have been coming to Nashville for years because of my history in the healthcare IT industry. Healthcare is such a large component of the local economy, and our country looks to Nashville for healthcare-related leadership.” The company’s founder, president and chief executive officer added, “The tipping point for the relocation was the local business and investment communities’ remarkable support and encouragement in building the business.”

Shareable Ink is the leading provider of enterprise-grade digital pen and paper applications for healthcare, making it ‘the ultimate mobile data collection tool.’ The company represents both an innovative and a pragmatic approach to addressing some common health information technology challenges without requiring wholesale reengineering of work processes.

Shareable Ink helps healthcare organizations transition to electronic health records without disruption to workflow or implementation of burdensome tech projects. It enables clinicians to continue documenting in the fastest, most natural manner, while populating electronic software with discrete data, as if typed with a keyboard. Built-in analytics give hospitals and practices insight into their operations that were previously inaccessible from traditional paper records.

Users simply fill out paper forms with a ballpoint pen as they have always done. With Anoto functionality, however, the unique forms capture every stroke of the high-tech pen. The paper used for the forms is actually standard printer paper but with a microscopic pattern of dots imprinted on each page using a laser printer. Then, the digital pen uses the dot pattern to identify its location on the page, and the built-in infrared camera records the coordinates of the handwritten strokes as the user writes.

Since the dot pattern is unique to each page, the pen is able to ‘recognize’ different documents. The handwritten strokes are stored in the pen’s memory until routed to Shareable Ink’s servers, where the handwriting is interpreted and converted to digital text in a matter of seconds.

In the last year, Shareable Ink has won substantial contracts with customers that have traditionally been resistant to EHRs, such as emergency medicine, anesthesia and hospitalist medicine. Most recently, the company formed a strategic partnership with T-System, a specialist in emergency department documentation, with more than 1700 hospital customers in the United States.

While there has never been greater pressure on hospitals to implement EHRs, there is a simple reason why the adoption rate has been in the single digits for years and electronic physician documentation even lower — it’s a hard transition. Instituting the level of process change that is required in critical clinical workflows is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and expensive. And at the end of the project, there is no guarantee that the new system will be fully adopted by physicians, whose priority is taking care of patients. Shareable Ink requires minimal IT resources to implement and support and even less time to learn, making it applicable across healthcare organizations large and small.

Hau has more than 15 years experience in developing HIT solutions and launching new ventures. As a 23-year-old MIT graduate, he co-founded PatientKeeper Inc., a physician documentation and computerized physician order entry application company. Hau is also an expert in raising the necessary capital to fund a start-up and grow it into viable business venture. He was instrumental in securing nearly $90 million in financing for PatientKeeper.

As for Shareable Ink, Hau said, “We are thrilled to have assembled a healthcare-savvy syndicate of funding partners. The proceeds from this financing will allow Shareable Ink to meet escalating market demand, fuel further product innovation, and support our growing customer base.”

Asked to evaluate the tech talent pool locally, Hau noted, “We’ve built an impressive team in Nashville with top-notch, local talent. On the technology front, there are strong candidates in Nashville, but they are few and far between. While I’m not worried about finding the next five strong engineers, sourcing the next 50 will be a challenge. Tod Fetherling of the Nashville Technology Council is a wonderful resource, and Professor Kenneth Galloway, dean of Engineering at Vanderbilt, has been helpful too. Nashville needs more engineering talent, and I hope creating meaningful jobs at ‘cool’ software companies can help.”

He continued, “The healthcare market is large and diverse. We service the market with a direct sales force and channel partners (or resellers), such as T-System, the market-leading emergency department documentation vendor.”

Hau added, “The business climate in Nashville is very robust. The community seems to share a very pro-entrepreneur, pro-job creation attitude.”

Of course all work and no play isn’t any fun. The new resident also observed that “Meanwhile, the social scene has a lot to offer and is quite vibrant. Nashvillians are a diverse bunch but always very friendly, and I especially appreciate that the city has so many ‘tucked-away gems’ to discover.”

Shareable Ink received the Series A Preferred investment from TNInvestco Tennessee Angel fund, Nashville Capital Network’s Angel fund, The Martin Companies and Heritage Group Holdings last fall. TNInvestco is a state economic development initiative that has, since 2009, used tax credit to fund and encourage “innovative new companies in the early stages of development.”

The preferred financing round came from a syndicate of veteran healthcare investors, including Heritage Group, The Martin Companies, Nashville Capital Network, Founder Collective, and Chip Linehand, who is a special partner at New Enterprise Associates, among other prominent healthcare investors. Local entrepreneurs David McClellan and Hal Andrews have joined the Shareable Ink’s Board of Directors.

The Shareable Ink funding was the first investment made by the Tennessee Angel Fund, one of the 10 venture funds participating in the state’s $200 million program creating incentives to nurture tech ventures in their early stages.

The economic development program requires that out-of state firms receiving TNInvestco dollars move their headquarters and most of their business operations to Tennessee. This spring Shareable Ink completed the transfer to Tennessee when its operations and staff plugged into the Green Hills area of Nashville.

Tags:

Bookmark:

Digg

Facebook

Technorati

Newsvine

Google

Related: