Physician Mobile Use is Growing

First off, Happy New Year. I am hoping 2012 will be a wonderful year.

A decade ago, it seemed that physicians, in general, were not adapting to mobile and other computer technology very quickly. That has been changing quickly.

Ten years ago, mobile devices were not very capable and had very limited memory. The applications available were also limited. Furthermore, hospitals and medical practices were just beginning to develop electronic medical record systems. A lot has changed.

A new report by Bulletin Healthcare analyzed physician use of mobile technology. The analysis specifically examined the reading habits of more than 550,000 healthcare providers, including more than 400,000 physicians, who subscribe to Bulletin Healthcare’s daily email briefings. The study found that from June 1, 2010, to February 28, 2011, mobile consumption of medical news climbed by 45 percent. Almost 3 in 10 healthcare professionals now access the daily medical information contained in their briefings on mobile platforms, while 7 in 10 continue to use traditional desktop platforms. The growth in mobile platform use is expected to continue this rapid increase.

In their analysis, Bulletin Healthcare found that the iPhone and iPad grabbed more than a 90 percent share of use in February, while Android saw only a 6 percent share. Other platforms like RIM and Palm barely registered. Perhaps equally important as Apple’s dominance was the change in share among platforms: iPhone use fell to 79 percent, from 86 percent, while iPad share nearly doubled to 14 percent from 8 percent. Devices based on Google’s® Android operating system which, according to The Nielsen Company, recently surpassed Apple’s offerings in share of the consumer smartphone market, more than doubled their share.

Use among specialties was quite variable, a threefold range in mobile-device use, between emergency physicians and physician assistants on the high end, and clinical pathologists on the low end. Pulmonologists were not specifically identified in the study.

Another report by IDC Health Insights found increasing demand for mobile health IT products. An interesting finding was a demand for more advanced mobile technologies, predicting a growing market for products that service this need. The survey respondents reported using an average of 6.4 different mobile devices on a daily basis. Forty-two percent reported high to very high adoption rates among their organization’s physicians and 86 percent predicted increased adoption rates in the next 12 to 24 months. The top obstacles to mobile technology deployment were data security, with 32 percent of respondents calling it a challenge, and cost, also with 32 percent calling it a challenge. Spending on mobile technologies is expected to increase through at least 2015, with most of the spending expected to be on software, infrastructure upgrades and securing data, rather than new hardware. It will be important to work to resolve issues specific to individually owned devices, such as smartphones, that are not subject to institutional security policies, even though they may be used for professional, as well as personal, purposes.

It appears that the next several years will be very interesting for mobile users.