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.
from the Palmdoc Chronicles
Physician Smartphone Adoption Experiencing Exponential Growth
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