Medical Practice and Mobile Devices

Alison Aldrich on the Dragonfly blog has an interesting post on medical applications on mobile devices. She notes a report stating, "54% of U.S. physicians own a PDA or a smartphone, and more than half of them consider the device to be an integral part of their practice. An estimated 70% of U.S. physicians will be using smartphones by 2011.

As these devices become more common, more library patrons will be using them in their medical lives as well as their personal lives. Alison directs us to a newly recorded presentation by Shikun “KK” Jiang, Medical Applications on Mobile Devices, reviewing several free and fee-based applications for health professionals.

There are currently over 250 medical applications available for the iPhone, alone. The University of British Columbia has published a very interesting wiki called Apple iPhone for physicians.

Epocrates, for example, is a free iPhone download and offers more than 3,300 brand and generic drug monographs, searchable by name or class as well as peer-reviewed drug content summarized from a wide range of authoritative sources, and includes MediMath which provides dozens of medical applications.

Below is a fascinating, if lengthy, discussion of ePocrates, specifically, and modern medical practice in general, but there’s so more. The video gets to some of the important ways that information is accessible from mobile devices in modern medical practice and offers an intimate insight into the many ways mobile technology is impacting medicine.