Almost Half of Doctors Use Smartphones to Reference Drug Data

by Jaime Brewster

Almost half of physicians say they use their smartphones to reference drug data, according to the Sources & Interactions Study, March 2014: Medical/Surgical Edition. Further, 45% of doctors say they use their devices to find/perform clinical situations and a third use them to make prescribing decisions.

There are certain tasks that doctors are more likely to conduct on smartphone compared to a tablet and vice versa. For example, more physicians use their smartphones to research specific clinical situations and get professional news updates. But more physicians say they use their tablets to complete CME credits/units, for medically oriented webcasts/podcasts and for reading articles from medical journals.

The Sources & Interactions™ Study is a detailed examination of doctors’ online and mobile activities, e-detailing experience, and exposure to (and evaluation of) information sources including traditional and emerging media, pharma reps, CME, convention and more. The study is conducted every six months and targets more than 3,000 physicians annually across 22 specialties, exploring their media preferences and habits. Sources & Interactions was designed to help marketers and their agencies cost-effectively allocate resources to their overall promotional mix, and provide publishers with specific insight about where their offerings fit into physicians (and other healthcare professionals’) information inventory.

If you need specialty-specific data, let us know. We study physician media behaviors and preferences annually across 22 specialties.