Epocrates, one of the top selling medical smartphone applications, recently published results from a survey of its physician users that found about 20 percent of them, or one in five plan to buy an Apple iPad when the device hits store shelves. Epocrates also announced it will create a special version of its app for the iPad.
The survey found that 9 percent of survey respondents plan to buy the iPad when it was immediately available; another 13 percent plan to buy it within the year; 38 percent of respondents are interested in the iPad but want more information about it before they commit to a decision.
Epocrates noted in a press release that of its more than 900,000 clinician users some 275,000 clinicians use Epocrates (Correction: This includes online users, too) or on their smartphones, including iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm devices. Read more from the release here.
SoftwareAdvice Survey: Which features are “must haves”?
In a separate effort, SoftwareAdvice surveyed 178 care providers, health IT professionals, and medical students to gauge their interest in the iPad and tablets in general. Here are the features this group listed as “must haves” for any tablet (not the iPad is lacking many of these):
More from SoftwareAdvice’s survey here.
February 9th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
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February 10th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
As Epocrates research shows, the early adoption of the iPad by doctors ( and presumably, nurses) is going to be significant. Also from their survey, we know that doctors are using the app from their smartphones at patient point of care. At Blausen Medical we believe this is one area (point of care patient education) where the new tablet devices like iPads are going to have major impact.
For instance with our Blausen Human Atla iPhone app that can show 3D animation videos of 150 medical conditions and treatments … http:www.blausen.com/iphone . While its been successful on the pocket sized iPhone, explaining complex core concepts using videos right on the iPhone, think how even more powerful these animations will be on the enlarged iPad real estate for today’s video-centric patient generation!
The iPad (and its posse of competing tablet devices) just may be taking patient education at point of care to the next level in 2010.
Bruce Blausen, CEO
Blausen Medical