Mobile devices in medicine: a survey of how medical students, residents, and faculty use smartphones and other mobile devices to find information

Abstract

Libraries should focus on providing access to a smaller number of highly used mobile resources instead of a huge collection until library-licensed mobile resources have streamlined authentication processes.

Empirical Look at the Use and Impact of Smart Phones by Medical Students for Laboratory/ Educational Purposes at Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo State

“…The major areas smarts made tremendous impact on their academic performance were easy and fast internet access, high speed browsing, saves their time and money going to cybercafé/ college library, easy access to medical teaching and e0learning materials/ e-text books. This is in collaboration with (Paddock 2012, Boruff andStories, 2014). Paddock, (2012) pointed out that, there is a lot relief to the students as the smart devices within their disposal saves them the stress involved in accessing these essential services in their medical teaching, learning and research activities which were previously difficult to access.…”

“…This creates a lot of inconveniences for the respondents who find it difficult to sacrifice their time for such situation due to the tight schedule of their medical education calendar. Boruff and Stories (2014), opine that a poor usage skill is another serious barrier bedevilling the effective use of smart phones for medical education. These are high tech digital gadgets that are often embedded with so much functionalities and it is expected of every user to have some level of understanding to make appreciable use of them, anything less than this will amount to frustration and underutilization for medical and health education.…”

“…The use of smart phone is not limited to speaking alone; it is being used for videos, recording information and transmitting it to phone or computer as was being done by a computer, mobile banking, and payment surveillance. According to Boruff and Stories (2014), smart phones are commonly used by medical students to find and gather medical and health information that help capacity building in health education.…”

Service selection in mobile environments: considering multiple users and context-awareness

“…Here, healthcare professionals currently start to use mobile devices in combination with hospital information systems to retrieve information about patients such as medical data and previous diseases but also about treatment rooms and operating theatres in terms of context information like location and time schedule (cf. Boruff & Storie, 2014; Ventola, 2014). This information can then be used for assigning healthcare professionals with certain skills to patients and near-located, available treatment rooms/operating theatres to minimise the overall duration (including waiting time) for the patients, for instance.…”

Restricted: Increasing Access to the Reference Collection

“…The health facility library context is quite different in the way clients (generally doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff) access and use information. Healthcare professionals rely heavily on point-of-care tools, which are typically available as downloadable mobile apps that can be accessed immediately on the unit when a question related to patient care arises [8]. According to Boruff and Storie [8] ".…”