Physician Smartphone Adoption Experiencing Exponential Growth
HCP Live reports
MENLO PARK, CA, July 23, 2010. Today, Spyglass Consulting Group released its most recent healthcare study, Point of Care Communications for Physicians. It shows significant trends on how physicians across the United States are adopting mobile communications at point of care to improve communications and collaboration, streamline productivity, and enhance patient care and safety.
Report reveals 94 percent of physicians are using smartphones to communicate, manage personal and business workflows, and access medical information. This represents a 60 percent increase from Spyglass’ findings in a similar study published in November 2006 where 59 percent of physicians were using Smartphones. “Physician smartphone adoption is occurring more rapidly than with members of the general public,” said Gregg Malkary, Managing Director of Spyglass Consulting Group. “Physicians are showing a clear preference for using the Apple iPhone (44 percent) over the RIM Blackberry (25 percent).”
You can download the press release (in PDF format) here
While the iPhone made huge advances in market share since its inception, according to the report, it holds 44% not quite the “overwhelming majority” as some would like to believe. The press release unfortunately does not give a detailed breakdown other than Blackberry at 25% so it begs to question what of the remaining 31%? It may be that some are still holding on to their venerable PalmOS devices or using Windows mobile since these two platforms have useful applications for healthcare professionals. The Palm Pre is just over 1 year old and relatively new in the market. I think it is opportunity for HP Palm to make a push into the healthcare sector – they need to market themselves as a tool which healthcare workers can use. There are already enough basic medical applications which we shall cover in our ongoing WebOS Medical App Roundup series and I expect more to come since Palm is making available tools such as Ares which makes developing applications for WebOS very easy (check out our Creating your own medical apps for WebOS series). On top of that, tablets or slate devices play very nicely in the healthcare niche so if the WebOS powered HP Hurricane has features which make it superior to the iPad (like USB connectivity, slick multitasking, Flash, cameras etc) that would make it a serious competitor to the iPad. In the meantime, the competition is stiff and Apple cannot afford to sit on its laurels.
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About the author, Alan: Alan Teh is a Malaysian Physician who specialises in Hematology-Oncology & Stem cell Transplantation. He has been using Palm PDAs since 1997 and is absolutely reliant on them. His current PDA is a Palm Pre and is a strong advocate of the webOS platform, Palm's latest operating system. Caught the blogging bug in 2004 and has been addicted ever since… |
Interesting seeing the smart phone distribution in my teaching hospital. Med students and residents like the Iphone. Many attendings are either avoiding smartphones or sticking with Blackberries. The more tech saavy are heading towards android. Some of my senior colleagues won’t consider att. Verizon seems to be favorite in NJ though I can’t say that in suburban nj, verizon is better than any of the other carriers. WebOs has a chance on snagging nonATT/Iphone users especially when they realize BB has become antiquated and its interface is not very intuitive (although a new BB os is coming very soon) I think android may be too confusing to nontechie physician smartphone users. I have been restrained with my webos recommendations until palm/hp devices get faster. The webOs medical app catalog is acceptable now. I overclock my Pre+ which makes the speed acceptable but this is not going to be helpful for most new physician users.
Downloaded ICD-9 ap which should be helpful.
Really NEED WebOS version of “STAT Growth-BP” which runs under Classic but not very efficiently. Any hope for this?
This is a great program for any of us who deal with children.
I agree Richard. StatCoder doesn’t have any plans to port his apps to WebOS (he seems to be doing so for the iPhone), so that gave me some impetus to start the ball rolling with medical WebOS apps. To be honest, the ones I have created have been out of necessity in that they are the ones I use in my own practice. I am not a family doc so things like Shots and Growth charts aren’t high up my priority list but as time permits, I’ll see what I can do.