According to a poll issued in May by Manhattan Research, a whopping 75 percent of U.S. physicians own some form of Apple device. “Despite the success of the Android platform in the overall consumer market,” said Manhattan Research President Meredith Ressi, “physicians are flocking to the iPhone as their smartphone of choice.” Bill Mulderry, president at Reston, Va.-based Bulletin Healthcare, which sponsored its own recent poll says After all, doctors make their livings in a “time-poor and information-rich environment.” Smartphones offer “a way to access information on a need-to-know basis, within their schedule.”
And Steve Jobs & Co. has been smart to market to docs from the moment the iPhone hit the scene, he says. “Apple has included medical across the board – certainly for the iPad, and for the iPhone as well.”
Doctors may be stereotyped by some in the health IT community as slow to warm to new technologies. But their swift adoption of smartphones is telling – it suggests that customizable products, that offer naturally autonomous physicians the ability to use them when and how they need to, will succeed. And those apps are just so darn cool.
“Other tablets are coming out, along the lines of the iPad, but certainly for medical uses – for patient education, for reviewing clinical information – the iPad is an ideal platform.”
Electronic health system vendors recognize this and have been designing apps specific for the IPad enabling physicians to adapt to digitalized records as well as obtain valuable information for patient care.
No one knows where the future of technology will take us on the healthcare front, but we all have Steve Jobs to thank for the innovations as well as “seeing into the future”.
