Only 10% Of Providers Access EHRs On Smartphones
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Although the majority of doctors use smartphones at work, very few use them to access EHR information.
A HIMSS Analytics’ survey found two of three doctors used smartphones at work. Now a second survey – this one conducted by Spyglass Consulting – found 96 percent of providers have smartphones but only one in 10 are willing to use them to access EHR information.
“Physician Smartphone adoption is nearly universal with 96 percent of physicians interviewed using Smartphones as their primary device to support clinical communications,” said Gregg Malkary, Managing Director of Spyglass Consulting Group. “Smartphones are preferred because they are easier to use and provide more enhanced functionality than outdated communication options provided by hospital IT including pagers, overhead paging systems, landline phones and fax machines.”
Only one-third of the “tech-savvy” doctors Spyglass interviewed reported they were offered any kind of tech support when trying to connect their mobile device to the electronic record. iHealth Beat reports 83 percent said they felt frustrated when using an EHR system for clinical communication. Their reasons included: inadequate messaging capabilities; limited usability; and poor interoperability.
According to the report, 70 percent “believe that hospital IT organizations of affiliated hospitals are making inadequate investments to address physician mobile computing and communication requirements at point of care due to limited planned investments, poor mobile EHR tools, and inadequate mobile user support.”
“There are inadequate mobile EMR tools,” Malkary told MobiHealth News. “When lot of organizations think about BYOD, they go ‘We’re just going to use desktop virtualization tools from organizations like Citrix, leverage our Citrix licenses and there you go, we’ve now provided you the ability to access your clinical systems.’ The irony there is that Citrix provides a poor user experience that’s difficult to use, it’s difficult to navigate, and it crashes, therefore physicians don’t want to use it. So docs are not enamored with the tools being provided by hospital IT.”
“And when you ask a lot of organizations we spoke to about what their future plans for mobility are, many aren’t planning extensive investments moving forward, because they’re not part of meaningful use,” he added.