Take Tunstall’s RTX3371 Wireless Telehealth Monitor, for example. The device just cleared the U.S. FDA and uses a slower GPRS cellular radio to receive and send data.

Vital signs are wirelessly collected from other compatible devices like weight scales and blood pressure units; the stats can then be forwarded on to doctors or hospitals by using the integrated cellular radio. As if that weren’t enough, the RTX3371 offers voice functionality for questionnaires on how a patient is feeling.

I still want to see this done by just one device… my smartphone.

Physicians increasingly are discovering smartphones serve a purpose beyond being a convenient communication gadget.

It is good to hear.  As you know we are big proponents of the use of mobile technology for everything  … so it is always good to read research that supports our crazy ideas.   Some of the highlights:

Physicians are adopting mobile technology at a faster rate than the general public (54% of U.S. physicians now and by 2011 70%).

Drug references are the top function accessed by physicians… Other applications are also available (i.e. medical calculators, decision-support tools and electronic health records).

Use of mobile technology among physicians will increase EHR adoption.

Palm started the trend a while back (no idea of dates) when they offered their devices to medical students with select drug reference guides already loaded.  Initially and for quite some time, physicians in general, and for no better reason than pure familiarity were heavy Palm users.  At first, BlackBerry had a tough time breaking in with this group but began to trickle into their ranks after having won the hearts and minds of hospital management and administration.  The main reason for this can be summarized into two words: enterprise grade! Administrators, security folks and management all recognized the BlackBerry platform as being more secure, stable, easy to manage and reliable.

Unfortunately I don’t have access to the reports referenced in the above article by Manhattan Research or the Diffusion Group to see if adoption is broken down by device, however if the data is there I would assume a continuing decline on the Palm side and an upwards trend for BlackBerry usage.  If we look at physicians specifically I would have to say that this group would lean more towards the iPhone.  But again this is pure speculation from my view (from the ground up).

My conclusion: mobile devices are still being used by physicians as a personal productivity tool and are not  integrated into care giving processes to the extent that real and transformational value have been achieved.  There are pockets of success around but it is definitely not widespread.

Read the rest of the post at the American Medical News.