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In an age of increasing regulation, shrinking reimbursements and a higher demand for services, healthcare providers, and more specifically their employed physicians, are being asked to do more with less.

Many providers are beginning to realize the financial incentives developed for adopting healthcare IT systems whose purpose is to improve care coordination and physician alignment often come with the unintended consequence of reduced productivity. In many cases, doctors and staff are required to replace their traditional daily workflows with a set of new, unfamiliar and often burdensome changes for delivering and documenting patient care. 

In healthcare today, rapid change is not merely an industry desire, but rather a mandated inevitability. Although many resist such change as an unwelcome burden for their practice or hospital, others see the advances in mobile technology as a solution to many of the disruptions in physician workflow, one that could ensure a subsequently painless transition to electronic health records (EHRs) while maintaining or even improving current productivity levels. 

As physicians now provide patient care across multiple facilities and settings, they have begun to desire a higher degree of mobility and flexibility in their workflows and processes. While successes in cloud computing have steadily improved care coordination - albeit at a snail's pace - nothing since the advent of the computer has transformed the way physicians access and edit patient information, document clinical notes, and interact with their patient population like the introduction of smartphone and tablet devices. 

Whereas practice management tools and EHRs are currently built for the PC environment, software built for smartphones and tablets has enabled doctors to be truly mobile, giving physicians the freedom to escape the workstation and complete many of their daily workflow tasks on the go. Although healthcare adoption of mobile technology is still in its infancy, it was recently reported that 75 percent of U.S. physicians own some form of Apple device, a trend that most experts agree will persist as the now fertile mobile app industry continues to grow and mature. Even though such devices have only been on the market for a handful of years, physicians can now dictate clinical notes with their iPhone, review MRIs from their iPad, and approve and sign documentation from anywhere in the world with an array of cloud-based software. 

Furthermore, compared to many of the legacy systems that require healthcare providers to purchase and maintain a large and often expensive hardware infrastructure, deploying mobile solutions - many of which can run on the same smartphones and tablets physicians already carry - can reduce the financial burden of regular hardware upgrades, and substantial maintenance and IT support costs. 

Even many of the traditional PC-Based EHR vendors are turning to mobile apps to increase physician adoption. By capitalizing on the intuitive and easy-to-use tap-and-go interfaces that are becoming a prerequisite for mobile devices, these vendors seek to streamline the core functionality of their software for physicians and other end users. As deeper integration with legacy systems occur, and concerns over data security and HIPAA compliance are alleviated, many predict the mobile device could take over the primary place in a physician's daily toolkit. 

Source: Billian's HealthDATA