News Feature | March 4, 2014

70% Of Doctors View Patient Information On Mobile Devices

Source: Health IT Outcomes
Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

HIMSS survey reveals majority of doctors use mobile devices to access patient information

“Physicians who are equipped with the pocket-sized devices spend just over two hours a day working on the touch screen computers, which amounts to 26 percent of their total computing time,” reported EHR Intelligence, “They gain 1.1 hours in daily productivity.”

Perhaps that’s why a recent HIMSS poll found the majority of physicians use mobile devices to look up patient information. According to the survey, 69 percent of providers use a mobile device to view patient information and 36 percent use mobile technologies to collect data at the bedside.

MobiHealth News reports physicians use their mobile devices to:

  • view patient information (69.4 percent)
  • look up non patient health information (64.7 percent)
  • educate and train others on the device (48.8 percent)
  • get clinical information (41.8 percent).

Sixty-nine percent of respondents said their organizations supplied them with smartphones, 67 percent were supplied with pagers, 56 percent were supplied with cellular phones, and 43 percent were supplied with tablets designed for healthcare. When clinicians were asked to identify the areas in which they would either add to or expand the use of mobile devices at their organizations, a majority, 63 percent, wanted tablets designed for healthcare.

"Tablets, in our experience, are very effective if you need not the entire EMR, but a slice of information," Will Morris, MD, associate chief medical information officer at the Cleveland Clinic, told MedPage Today. "For smaller healthcare systems, I think tablets are a wonderful way for them to capitalize on their best assets, which are the people who are employed there, and allow them to work more efficiently.”

According to HIMSS, 77 percent of the apps they used were developed by third parties, 52 percent indicated that clinicians used apps developed by the organization’s HIT vendor, and 32 percent of clinicians indicated they used apps that were developed internally.