WPFInk is a working title for an application that allows an interactive e-paper experience using the new multi-touch capabilities of the Dell XT tablet PC.

What WPFInk is not
Tablet PCs have long been proposed as a good solution for hospitals and for custom written applications can work well, but the reality is most off the shelf apps that are in use are only designed to work with a keyboard and mouse and using them on tablets is a painful experience. Ink forms for use on tablets (such as MiForms) are good, but they do require as much (if not more) effort to create and maintain as their desktop equivalents. WPFInk was inspired by the huge gap between paper notes (and scanned notes) in a hospital and structured forms based applications.

WPFInk Benefits
What WPFInk proposes is replicating the "unstructured" paper notes that are in use now but in a digital form, this requires no significant process change or huge product teams worrying about datatypes and form layout, but can provide huge benefits right now in records management; storage, transport, misplacement, multi-access, audit trail, searchability. As the paper process is replicated the notes can also be printed and placed in the patients notes very easily if only used for part of the record.

Some doctors use OneNote to provide this sort of functionality in a single practice, but this has limited scalability and is quite complex to use. WPFInk keeps the interface clean, uncluttered and most importantly touch based, which can get over problems of screen size when trying to fit an A4 sheet of paper onto a 12" screen by providing intuitive panning and zooming (like an iPhone) without messy scrollbars and zoom dropdowns. Ideally we would use tablets with slightly larger than A4 high dpi screens, but they don't exist yet.