Dive Brief:
- While most industries are leaping into mobile application development and mobile friendly websites, health care is lagging far behind in this area, according to a new study.
- A recent survey of 2,300 chief information officers at US companies (all types, not just health care) found that 70% had some kind of mobile strategy for interacting with their customers. Most of them (56%) employ both native apps and mobile friendly websites.
- Meanwhile, the percentage of CIOs at health care companies who said they had no mobile strategy at all was higher than any other industry studied. 36% of CIOs at health care companies said that their organization had no mobile strategy, compared to 60% of CIOs at business and retail companies who said they had apps and mobile friendly sites.
Dive Insight:
While mobile applications and websites aren't absolutely critical to the functioning of hospitals and clinics these days, I'd argue that consumers will soon begin to chafe at the lack of mobile access provider services, scheduling and the like. And doctors will soon demand better mobile access to resources. If nothing else, consumers love the convenience of mobile applications, and some doctors want, among other things, native applications for their EMR written for smart phone platform use. Though it's understandable that CIOs have other priorities at this point—life-and-death stuff like integrating their EMR with their operations—the day of mobile reckoning is coming soon.