According to a new study conducted by textbook publisher Springer Publishing, 74.6 percent of nurses in the US use smartphones or tablets. Of those smartphone owners, 43.7 percent own an iPhone or iPod Touch, 29.8 percent an Android phone, and 22 percent an iPad. The survey was conducted in September 2011.

Curiously, the number of respondents that said they owned a smartphone or tablet (821) matched the number who said they were primarily employed at a college or university. While it's not clear, we believe that means about 821 of the respondents were nursing students. No surprise if the majority of nursing students use some form of smartphone or tablet, but that would make the overall metric coming out of this survey less compelling.

The publisher's survey include responses from approximately 1,100 respondents. Many of the respondents possessed Master's degrees in nursing (40.5 percent).

In a separate survey conducted by physician mobile and online community QuantiaMD this summer, eighty percent of physicians said they owned a smartphone and 1 in 4 MDs owned both a smartphone and a tablet. Manhattan Research surveys indicate that more than 80 percent of US physicians now use a smartphone or PDA.

According to the Springer survey results, despite the substantial amount of smartphone and tablet owners, almost half (46.4 percent) of the nurses surveyed have never downloaded a medical app. Of those that did, 27 percent downloaded only free apps, 22.7 percent downloaded both free and paid, 3.8 percent only downloaded paid apps. Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of respondents said Epocrates was their favorite app.

Want to read stories as soon as they are posted? Follow MobiHealthNews on Facebook.
On Twitter? Be sure to follow MobiHealthNews for up-to-the-minute news and industry analysis.

Read the full survey results here.