Cerner Physician Express
In the US clinical mobility spending is expected to grow from $2.9 billion in 2011 to $5.4 billion in 2016, marking a compound annual growth rate of 12.7 percent, according to IDC Health Insights.
IDC Health Insights makes the distinction between mobile health and clinical mobility or mobile point of care. The research firm distinguishes mHealth as consumer focused and clinical mobility or mobile point of care as clinician focused. For the purposes of this report, IDC Health Insights uses the terms clinical mobility and mobile point of care synonymously.
In 2011, MobiHealthNews wrote about a similar IDC report in which mobile point-of-care spending was expected to hit $4.4B by 2015, up from almost $2.8 billion in 2010, representing an annual growth rate of 9.9 percent. The 2011 report predicted that by 2015 clinical mobility should represent about 10 percent of the worldwide health IT market.
This report provides an updated spending prediction for clinical mobility including hardware, IT services and software related to clinical mobility. Program Director of Connected Health IT Strategies at IDC Health Insights Lynne Dunbrack authored the report.
While Dunbrack finds demands on IT and the need to respond to health reform initiatives as hindering growth in clinical mobility spending, the report also identified meaningful use-driven technologies such as EHRs, eRx, CPOE and HIE as methods to accelerate the use of mobile point of care solutions.
IDC determined that the trends that will have the greatest impact on the market include the consumeriziation of technology, increased availability of electronic health information and resulting clinicians' desire for mobile access to patient data, infrastructure demands of pervasive computing, and security to comply with increasingly more stringent HIPAA requirements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
MobiHealthNews rounded up Apple's top 118 apps for healthcare professionals, which included a number of apps in the clinical mobility category. See the full list of Apple's picks here.
