Elizabeth Moore (@ejamoore) at CNET HealthNews (which I really like) has put together a nice piece on physician smartphone use. It’s worth a peek.
A couple of things (not surprising) of note:
- A 2010 Manhattan Research survey puts physician smartphone adoption at 72%. They predict 2012 adoption will approach 81%.
- Blackberry and iPhone adoption would appear to remain neck and neck as far as preference among physicians.
- Significant numbers of physicians are using smartphones at point of care – 94% in a very small sample of 100.
And pharma appears to know this, for better or for worse. Having just returned from Digital Pharma West I can tell you that mobile apps are in 2010 what destination sites were for pharma 1995: Everyone’s gotta have one. Because, of course, if you have a mobile application you will work your way into the phone (and the mind) of the prescribing physician.
But not so fast. The presence of an app on my iPhone says nothing about my inclination to use it. And more and more I’m working to rely on just a few things.
This assessment from Spyglass Consulting Group’s 2010 report might be worth thinking about:
Physicians interviewed report they are overwhelmed by the daily volume of communications received from colleagues, care team members, and patients. They lack automated tools to manage voice mail, pager messages, SMS messages, and electronic mail. They are forced to continually check separate data silos and manually filter and prioritize communications based upon sender, subject and priority. Critical communications easily fall through the cracks.
So more apps may not be the answer. Just like another website wasn’t the answer in 1995.
Connecting and messaging to physicians in will require an understanding of precisely how they operate and use their tools – both workstation based and mobile. The quote from Spyglass unfortunately sums up the physician experience as it’s currently evolving.
Recognition of this reality and a clear understanding of workflow will offer insight into whether an app stands a chance of ever making it into a physician’s attention span.
This is something: A study published in the July 20, 2010 Annals of Internal Medicine finds that 5% of residency applications contain plagiarized content. The study from Boston’s Brigham & Woman’s Hospital is based on the personal statements of nearly 5,000 residency applicants that were matched against a database of published content.
The authors comment that the study is limited, among other things, by the fact that it was done in just one institution. It makes me wonder if the number is artificially high or potentially too low.
So why would medical students lie?
It’s the era of digital reverberation. Perhaps we’re seeing the digital youth coming of age. Take unbridled access to the worldwide database of human content and couple that with the capacity to cut-and-past and you’ve got a recipe for reverberation. Just look at the blogosphere.
Ignorance is bliss. While a sorry excuse, perhaps they don’t know better. There’s the sad reality that subtle forms of plagiarism have become the standard for students beginning at the secondary level. It’s conceivable that there’s a growing population that doesn’t see this type of ‘borrowing’ as a problem.
Competition. Throw in a little competition (on top of shifting norms and ignorance) and the temptation is greater. The study found that plagiarized content was more common non-U.S. trained applicants where the demands for a sharp application are all the higher. The Brigham, incidentally, is a Harvard institution.
And maybe this is nothing new. Perhaps this kind of behavior has been in play since the dawn of medical residency. Technology may now have allowed the exposure of a problem not unique to this generation of doctors.
I don’t have the answer to this one except that education regarding what constitutes unethical academic conduct has to begin early in the educational process. As the father of an 11-year-old who has already begun accessing the web for projects, I can see cut-and-paste easily evolving as a way of life for the next generation.
So if you’re a medical school or residency applicant keep in mind that big brother is watching and his ability to identify academic fraud will only get better. And if you have ideas that aren’t original, you best keep ‘em to yourself.