How doctors use smartphones in hospitals

Findings suggest that medical residents are looking for quicker forms of medical confirmation and information, rather than multimedia formats that may be more time consuming to process during clinic. This is consistent with another recent review by Jay Agarwal MD on medical apps that lead to positive ratings.

Tele-psychiatry in Texas

Carmen Chu MSc MPH(c), iMedical Apps December 16, 2015

If you walk around any hospital, it’s obvious medical staff are using their smartphones frequently. Are they using them for patient-related information, or just general communication? Researchers recently conducted a study to answer these questions and more.

Raaum, et al conducted a survey in 2014 on 43 emergency and 141 internal medicine residents from the University of Utah and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Their frequency of smartphone use for general features (e.g., emails, browser, instant messaging etc.) was compared with patient-specific/medical apps, stratified by residency year and training specialty.

Overall, they found that residents used their phones for general purposes two times more often than for medical purposes (72.2% vs 33.0%), and both general and medical app use were higher amongst third and fourth year residents compared with first and second year residents (75.1% vs 70.5% and 36.5% vs 31.1%, respectively). Internal medicine residents’ general use of smartphones was higher than that of emergency residents (74.6% vs 64.3%). Of those surveyed, 74.3% had 1-10 medical apps on their smartphone, 16% with 11-20 medical apps, and 9.2% had more than 21 medical apps.

Continue reading in iMedical Apps

jeehp-12-48
Emergency medicine and internal medicine trainees’ smartphone use in clinical settings in the United States, Raaum SE, Arbelaez C, Eduardo Vallejo, Patino AM, Colbert-Getz JM, Milne CK. J Educ Eval Health Prof. 2015 Oct 29. doi: 10.3352/jeehp.2015.12.48. [Epub ahead of print]

Also see
Your therapist will text you now in engadget