Smartphones in Medicine: Emerging Practices in an Academic Medical Center

Abstract

Advances in mobile phone technology now provide a myriad of resources to physicians' fingertips. However, the medical profession continues to struggle with potential for misuse of these devices. There is a need for better understanding of physicians' uses of smartphones in order to establish guidelines for appropriate and professional behavior. The purpose of the current study was to survey physicians' and medical students' practices concerning smartphone use in the healthcare setting. Physicians and medical students were asked to complete anonymous surveys regarding uses of smartphones within the past month in various healthcare settings. Overall, the participants reported distinctly different patterns in the uses they made of their phones in different settings (P<.001), with most individuals engaging in most behaviors while on break but few using their smartphones while with patients or during procedures. It appears that physicians and medical students make decisions about using their smartphones according to some combination of three considerations: degree of relevance to patient care, the appropriateness of the behavior in front of patients, and the issue of how disruptive that behavior may be.

Perception of medical students for utility of mobile technology use in medical education

“…[17] Recent study reveals that physicians and medical students make decisions about using their Smartphones according to some combination of three considerations: Degree of relevance to patient care, the appropriateness of the behavior in front of patients, and the issue of how disruptive that behavior may be. [18] There is a perceived risk that portable devices may distract from the provision of patient or client care if used by health professionals or students during employment. [19] The present study mobile technology was extensively used for social communication.…”

Bring-your-own-device in medical schools and healthcare facilities: A review of the literature (Preprint)

“…After deduplication and iterative review of abstracts and full texts, 14 articles were identified as meeting the inclusion criteria, 8 of which were original research articles [9,[17][18][19][20][21]26,39]. Five were magazines articles (all coming from the USA) [16,[22][23][24]27] and one a viewpoint journal article [25].…”

“…All the publications were from high-income countries as follows: nine from the USA [9,16,19,20,[22][23][24]27,39], two from the UK [25,26], two from Canada [17,18] and one from Ireland [21]. The identified review articles were published between 2012 and 9 2016: one in 2012 [20], two in 2013 [23,27], five in 2014 [16,17,21,24,25], two in 2015 [19,22], and four in 2016 [9,18,26,39].…”

“…Enabling BYOD can also precipitate challenges such as unsecure [16][17][18][19][20][21] and inappropriate use of mobile devices, [7,9,16,18,21,22] including medical applications (apps) [10]. These challenges are in most cases attributable to lack of technologies and systems for managing communication [16,23,24], network controls [7,10], and education [4,17,18,25].…”

“…These challenges are in most cases attributable to lack of technologies and systems for managing communication [16,23,24], network controls [7,10], and education [4,17,18,25]. Nonetheless, the lack of guidance in the form of BYOD policies [20,26,27] or mobile device use policies 4 [9,10] and regulations [25] remains a challenge for medical schools and healthcare facilities; hence a strong suggestion for enactment of policies as measures for ensuring effective BYOD implementation [16,23,28,29].…”