Physicians Online

86% of U.S. physicians use the Internet to gather health, medical or prescription drug information.

Of physicians who use the Internet for health information, 92% said they accessed it from their office, while 21% said they did so with a patient in the examination room.

88% said they looked for health information online from home, while 59% reported doing so from a mobile device.

71% said they start their research with a search engine, 92% of those using Google.

58% of doctors search more than once per day — including 65% of primary care physicians.

Of physicians who start with a search engine, 57% use terms related to conditions, 36% use terms related to treatments and trials, and 33% look for branded medication.

About a third of the surveyed physicians said they had made a change to a patient’s medication as a result of a search, or had initiated new treatment.

Survey of 411 physicians was conducted between May 20 and June 8, 2009 by Hall & Partners.

71% of physicians consider a smartphone essential to their practice and 84% said that the Internet is critical to their job.

94% of physicians are using smartphones to communicate, manage personal and business workflows, and access medical information.

• Seventy-eight percent of physicians interviewed were experiencing difficulties accessing and communicating with colleagues in a timely manner. Physicians are busy mobile professionals who are constantly on the go and are not always available when they are needed.

• Physicians report they are overwhelmed by the daily volume of communications received from colleagues, care team members, and patients. They lack automated tools to manage voice mail, pager messages, SMS messages, and electronic mail. They are forced to continually check separate data silos and manually filter and prioritize communications based upon sender, subject and priority. Critical communications easily fall through the cracks.

• Fifty-six percent of physicians interviewed were concerned about lack of standardized processes for transitioning care between colleagues. Patient hand-off process used by hospital-based physicians and the patient referral process used by community-based physicians are informal and ad hoc which can introduce medical errors into the patient care process.