Brett Miller, President, Physicians Interactive Holdings’ Healthcare Professional Division

In the relatively short history of mobile healthcare, 11 years might seem like an eternity. But that’s how long mobile healthcare content provider Skyscape has been in business. Fittingly for such an established player, the Marlborough, Mass.-based company has had to reinvent itself several times to stay relevant.

“Skyscape evolved as kind of an Amazon of medical resources,” Brett Miller, president of parent company Physicians Interactive Holdings’ Healthcare Professional Division, tells MobiHealthNews. It took well-known medical texts and reference books and repackaged them in digital form for PDAs and, later, smartphones.

In 2009, Skyscape was bought by Physicians Interactive, the former drug-detailing unit of EHR vendor Allscripts Healthcare Solutions. Skyscape now accounts for about 90 percent of the Healthcare Professionals Division.

Miller, who joined the company in February 2010, says it’s fair to call Skyscape and the Healthcare Professionals Division the mobile arm of Physicians Interactive for now, but expect that to change in the future. “It probably will evolve into more than that,” Miller says. “We own some proprietary resources to help physicians with their workflow,” he explains.

And mobile is the right way to reach them, according to a survey of oncologists that Skyscape planned to release today. “Responding to a survey by Skyscape, oncologists said the use of mobile technology helps reduce medical errors and increases the amount of patients they can see during the day,” a company statement says.

Actually, less than a majority made those claims, but the results are interesting. About 33 percent of respondents said that mobile devices “create efficiencies in their weekly workflow that  allows them to increase patient volumes,” according to Skyscape. More than 71 percent Some 45 percent of the oncologists said mobile resources—including Skyscape’s drug-dosing calculator—helped them reduce medical errors. (Update: Skyscape tabulated the wrong percentage in an earlier version of their press release, which is now pushed back and will be published next week.)

But mobile devices apparently are an integral part of the practice of oncology today. According to the Skyscape, 82 percent of those surveyed said they consult a mobile device at least four times a day, using mostly smartphones during patient consultations, to communicate with other medical professionals and in their private offices.

The results mostly corroborate results from a more extensive survey of 1,700 U.S. physicians that Skyscape conducted late last year, but in some ways sound like findings Skyscape might have reported in its early days.

In the 2010 poll, 92 percent of physicians said they consult a PDA or other handheld device in a clinical setting daily and 81 percent indicated they get the answers they were looking for within 90 seconds. Nearly as many—78 percent—said that using PDAs (yes, PDAs) at the point of care helps to reduce medical errors.

According to Skyscape—and here’s the data point that seems rather, well, dated—physicians most often use their PDAs to look up drug information and view clinical references.

Skyscape hopes to use these results to improve its products. “We’re trying to find out where some gaps are in terms of docs not optimizing their time,” Miller says.

Areas that represent major opportunities are in the proliferation of touch-screen tablets such as the iPad and in the national push for physicians and hospitals to adopt electronic health records. “With the increased use of the EHR and the EMR, some of the focus on mobile and the growth of tablets … there’s a little bit of a blurring between mobile and the PC,” says Miller.

“It is time to take another look at the breadth and depth of Skyscape resources,” he adds.

In this spirit, Skyscape next week will introduce a suite of decision-support apps for pediatricians, the first in a planned series of bundled offerings for various medical specialties, according to Miller.

“There’s an ongoing effort by us to continue to adapt to the best practices in the industry,” Miller says.