The hospital was one of several test sites for a handheld device called the C5. Sporting a 10.4-inch display screen, the portable PC was manufactured by Austin, Texas-based Motion. The partnership also marks Intel's entry into hospital-focused mobile computing.

With the device, the hospital says nurses working in acute care units can now input data into a computer, rather than on notepad paper first, which would be typed into a laptop later. The latter scenario, according to UCSF officials, can lead to a delay of as much as two and a half hours in getting patient data into the medical center's database, and can sometimes lead to errors that could hurt the patient.

In worst-case scenarios, the wrong medicine or dosage could be prescribed to a patient. Or perhaps a nurse, who is regularly assigned several patients, could input data for the wrong person. But rather than focus on the weaknesses of current paper-based workflows in hospitals, Intel, Motion and UCSF executives described at a news conference how the new device could ease nurses' administrative workload, so they can spend more time with patients.

"This is about re-inventing the workflow and the systems to make the hardware work," Mark Laret, chief executive officer of UCSF Medical Center said during a news conference on Tuesday.