Younger Physicians Are More Likely to Use Smartphones for Professional Purposes
The vast majority of physicians under the age 35 (93%) use a smartphone for professional purposes, according to current wave data from the Sources & Interactions Study, March 2014 – Medical/Surgical Edition. Older physicians are less likely to use both smartphones and tablets devices for work; 59% of physicians over the age of 60 use smartphones and 42% use tablets.
Younger physicians (under the age of 35) are also much more likely to use medical apps on smartphones than their older counterparts, with 90% reporting that they use at least one kind of smartphone app for professional purposes. 83% use a smartphone app for diagnostic tools/clinical reference and 77% use apps for drug and coding references. When we look at doctors ages 35-44, those percentages drop to 68% and 62% respectively. Further, the study found that those percentages drop more significantly for doctors ages 45-59: 55% use the former and 47% use the latter.
Mobile apps used on tablets shows a slightly different story. Age isn’t as much of a differentiator of tablet app usage for professional purposes. For example, 45% of doctors under 35 use a tablet app for medical journals/newspapers/magazines, while 36% of doctors between the ages of 45-59 use them.
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.
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