More Physicians Use Mobile Technology in Clinical Care
Posted on 07 January 2009
From the American Medical News:
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.
7 responses to More Physicians Use Mobile Technology in Clinical Care
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[...] More Physicians Use Mobile Technology in Clinical Care [...]
[...] may just be that I have written about this in the past (check out -More Physicians Use Mobile Technology in Clinical Care) and have not really dedicated that much time to iPhone medical applications or BlackBerry medical [...]
[...] Or better yet, I can summarize it for you with a quote: … due to Palm’s history with physicians I think developers and mobile health application vendors should not ignore the Pre and should start [...]