Here's a stat that made me sit up and take notice. According to new research from connected home and broadband media analyst firm The Diffusion Group, the number of active physicians using Internet-enabled smartphones should hit 70 percent by 2011. If TDG's research is on target, this isn't just a trend, it's a landslide.

When I read these numbers, my first reaction was skepticism. OK, my consumer health experience may not be relevant, but I've never seen my friendly local GP or my son's podiatrist pull out a BlackBerry or an iPhone to so much as check e-mail, much less use such a device to, say, look up a test result or retrieve an image.

But as I thought it over, it made more and more sense. Even if TDG's projections are a bit ambitious, clearly something substantial is going on here. And it's something you don't want to miss.

Though they may be the early adopters, some physicians are already accessing clinical data, lab findings and even reviewing images using mobile devices. And eventually, all but the biggest Luddites will follow, at least to access hospital and insurance company systems. (If you're looking for physician-managed EMRs to push mobile device adoption, well, don't hold your breath.)

Not only that, I'm confident that telemedicine approaches like wireless monitoring of home-based patients and letting remote specialists diagnose over a network will leak into the practice of traditional community-based medicine. After all, it's increasingly evident that such exercises can have meaningful clinical and financial benefits.

Now, the question for you, readers, is how to leverage this movement. After all, particularly if you're a hospital or group practice IT administrator, you still have the chance to have an impact on physician mobile device usage. 

In particular, you have a chance to learn what data physicians want to access, and incorporate that knowledge into everything from your IT hiring and development plans to your remote access and security policies. Knowing physicians are headed this way might change your plans for IT spending over the next few years, or even for 2008.

If you start now, you probably have time to gather user feedback, develop a suite of mobile applications that serve staff and MD needs, test them, tweak them, harden them and integrate them with your key clinical data systems before your physicians get hooked on apps from other players.

Or, you can do nothing other than the minimum--say, mobile e-mail integration--and let insurance companies, government entities, vendors and other random players set the agenda. To me, that sounds like a pretty unattractive prospect. What about you? - Anne