(HealthDay News) — Smartphones and smartphone applications are increasingly being used in a professional capacity among physicians, according to two reports published in the March issue of Kantar Media Sources & Interactions Study-Medical/Surgical Edition.
The Kantar Media Healthcare Research team surveyed more than 3,000 physicians across 21 specialties regarding smartphone use for professional purposes. The researchers found that 74% of respondents reported using a smartphone for professional purposes (representing a 9% year-over-year increase) and 38% reported using both a smartphone and tablet for professional purposes. Forty-three percent of respondents reported using their smartphone to reference drug data (a 13% year-over-year increase), and there was an increase in the percentage who find or perform clinical calculations, up from 35% to 39%.
In a second study, the team surveyed physicians about use of smartphone applications for work. The researchers found that, of the 74% of those surveyed who reported using smartphones for work, 72% used diagnostic tools/clinical reference applications and 64 percent used applications for drug and coding references. The types of applications most frequently used on tablets were medical journals/newspapers/magazines (73%), diagnostic tools/clinical reference (61%), and electronic medical records (49%).
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“Perhaps most interesting is that of all of the tasks that are tracked on smartphone in the study, not one showed a decrease year-over-year, demonstrating how deeply ingrained smartphone usage is becoming in the medical workplace,” according to the first report.
