As doctors increasingly adopt mobile devices, this much seems clear: At least for now, Apple is king.

 

According to an April survey of U.S. physicians, sponsored by Aptilon Corporation, 61 percent of docs intend to own an iPhone by the end of 2011 – up sharply from 39 percent at the beginning of the year. Strikingly, that's more than double the iPhone’s 24.7 percent adoption rate among American smartphone users at large.

 

In another poll, released in May by Manhattan Research, the numbers were even more impressive: It found that a whopping 75 percent of U.S. physicians own some form of Apple device. “Despite the success of the Android platform in the overall consumer market," said Manhattan Research President Meredith Ressi, "physicians are flocking to the iPhone as their smartphone of choice."

 

Bill Mulderry, president at Reston, Va.-based Bulletin Healthcare, which sponsored its own recent poll – it found similar huge numbers for Apple, with Android usage registering at roughly six percent, and other platforms like RIM and Palm products barely making a blip – says "the acceleration of mobile across all of specialties" is continuing.

 

It makes sense, he says. After all, doctors make their livings in a "time-poor and information-rich environment." Smartphones offer "a way to access information on a need-to-know basis, within their schedule."

 

And Steve Jobs & Co. has been smart to market to docs from the moment the iPhone hit the scene, he says. "Apple has included medical across the board – certainly for the iPad, and for the iPhone as well."

Doctors may be stereotyped by some in the health IT community as slow to warm to new technologies. But their swift adoption of smartphones is telling – it suggests that customizable products, that offer naturally autonomous physicians the ability to use them when and how they need to, will succeed. And those apps are just so darn cool.

 

As for tablets, Mulderry is interested to see what will happen as the market evolves and more and more products start to compete. "Certainly the iPad is dominant now," he says. "Other tablets are coming out, along the lines of the iPad, but certainly for medical uses – for patient education, for reviewing clinical information – the iPad is an ideal platform."

 

Irrespective of brand, it certainly seems smartphones and tablets are here to stay. As physicians "become more and more comfortable" with using tools like those, says Mulderry, and more hospitals and clinics start providing them – or even "mandating" their use – it's a safe bet those adoption numbers, already impressively high, will only move northward.