Clinician use of mobile devices continues to climb

Clinicians continue to adopt mobile computing devices at a rapid rate this year, with nearly 90 percent expected to use smartphones in 2014 and almost as many using tablets.

Medical content vendor Epocrates released its second annual Mobile Trends Report based on a survey of 1,063 clinicians from its market research panel in May 2013. The survey included more than 200 respondents from each of five clinician types: physician assistant/nurse practitioner, primary care, cardiology, oncology and psychiatry.

Epocrates labels clinicians who routinely use a tablet, smartphone and laptop/desktop computer as “digital omnivores” and found that 47 percent of responding clinicians were in this group, up from 28 percent in its 2012 survey. The vendor expects at least 80 percent of clinicians to use the three platforms within the next year but expects primary care physicians to go from their current 47 percent to 85 percent next year.

Mobile devices account for up to 40 percent of surveyed clinicians’ digital time at work but tablets and smartphones are the most popular outside of office hours.

Activities such as texting a colleague, lab requests/results, entering consult notes, accessing patient materials, remote patient monitoring, scheduling and getting information from a drug manufacturer scored only a 2 percent usage rate.

Eighty percent of surveyed physicians’ practices have implemented an EHR and 60 percent of those who have not expect to during the next year. Only one-third of clinicians with an EHR say it is optimized for mobile use, however. “Industry stakeholders such as EHR providers, pharmaceutical companies, technology firms and content owners must now determine how best to leverage this groundswell of behavioral input to inform product development and marketing programs that support providers in successfully embracing these rapidly evolving models of healthcare,” Epocrates said.