What do physicians do when they have an urgent question at the point of care that needs to be answered? Nowadays, they'll take out their smartphone.
Roughly 90 percent of clinicians own at least one mobile device, and more than 70 percent use it for work-related purposes, according to the most recent surveys. And they're not just making a quick phone call to a colleague – they're searching for reliable data or images, or posting an urgent question on a chatroom or social site.
And that has good and bad implications.
EBSCO Health, which produces the DynaMed Plus clinical decision support app, recently had its User Research Group conduct a study about how doctors search for information at the point of care. Their study turned up five insights that any provider should consider when developing a smartphone-based care coordination platform.
1. Speed counts. Doctors say they have anywhere from 2 seconds to 5 minutes to get the information they need, and that includes typing in terms (not always an easy feat on a smartphone) and reading articles (also tough, if the site is not mobile-optimized or you have problems reading text off a smartphone screen). When you're talking about high-pressure, time-sensitive, possible-life-and-death situations, there's little patience for that spinning wheel that denotes a search underway. And in most searches, those doctors said, if they don't see what they want within five results, they'll try again.
Often in these situations, doctors say a picture or an image really is worth a thousand words, or the time it takes to read them. Physicians said they often prefer image results and how-to videos in certain clinical care situations, making sites like YouTube and Instagram valuable to them.
2. Security is secondary. Again, speed counts, and those doctors surveyed said authentication often hinders their efforts to get quick answers to questions – so they tend to use resources that might not require security checks, which can be unreliable and even dangerous. In other words, at the point of care, forget multiple log-ins, complicated passwords or password reminders, or username issues.
3. Finding the pearl in the oyster – or looking for a needle in a haystack. Physicians surveyed said they're often pretty confident of the care plan they've laid out, and just need that one piece of information to be sure. So they're looking for that one pearl of wisdom as confirmation, and they often know very specifically what they're looking for.
Not that it's easy to find, though. Doctors surveyed said the pain point lies in wading through search results that don't give them that pearl – they're looking at search results that are too broad, or too complicated to easily extract the information they need. Suddenly that pearl is a needle in a very big haystack, and time is off the essence.
4. Smartphones are the device of choice. Nearly every doctor has one and carries it everywhere, making BYOD policies that much more important to health systems. In fact, doctors prefer using the smartphone to shared desktops or laptops at a nurse's station – often seen as "nurses' territory" – or Wi-Fi-based devices that might cut in and out between floors and buildings. They'll even carry charging cables around their necks, right next to their stethoscopes, to make sure they have access to a reliable device when needed.
5. Don't forget e-mail. "E-mail has become sacred; anything impersonal in the inbox is a violation," the EBSCO folks said. Doctors are subscribing to e-mail alerts from trusted sources to stay up-to-date on their specialty – and to prepare for grilling from the patient who has done his or her homework online as well.
See also:
Nurses and smartphones: A vital connection
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