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EU vs. US Physicians - Episode 38 Miranda Manganaro - Healthcare Analyst Today we will be discussing some similarities and differences among physicians in the United States and across Europe. The European countries included in this analysis are France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. It is easy to imagine that our neighbors across the pond would be quite different than their physician counterparts in the US. Not only are they distant in proximity, but differences in language and culture are also distinctly present – not to mention vast differences in our healthcare systems. However, US and European physicians are markedly similar in their relationship to online activities. On average, physicians in the United States spend around 16 hours online per week compared to 12 hours a week for European physicians. US and European physicians spend almost the same amount of their online time for professional purposes. They also share a similar opinion of the Internet’s impact on their practices with almost 90% of physicians in the US and Europe agreeing the Internet is essential to their professional practice. Once these physicians are online, their use of professional activities is also fairly congruent. A vast majority of online physicians in the US and EU are utilizing online professional journals, a number that has grown substantially in both continents in recent years. Use of online textbooks and continuing medical education are also on the rise among online physicians in the US and Europe. We see more contrasts between US and European physicians when it comes to utilizing more advanced activities for professional use. For instance, European physicians are more likely to watch online video, listen to/download audio, and SMS message for professional purposes than physicians in the United States. European physicians seem to be aligned with their patients in this arena as we also see this trend towards more advanced activities between EU and US consumers, where EU consumers are more likely to use such mediums than their American counterparts. Lastly, technology ownership among physicians in the US and Europe also provides some similarities as far as adoption is concerned between the two sets of physicians. We see similar ownership numbers with devices such as laptops and MP3 players/iPods. When it comes to smartphone popularity, we do see differences among those physicians in each region who own a smartphone/PDA regarding their device of choice. The most popular smartphone among physicians who own one in Europe is the iPhone, while Blackberry still holds the top place among US physicians who own a smartphone at 37%. What physicians are doing on their smartphone/PDAs is also indicative of some differences with regard to mobile activities. Physicians in the US are much more likely to be accessing drug reference databases online – an area significantly developed in the US through Epocrates over the past decade. Physicians in the US are highly reliant on mobile drug reference databases during their workday, which is a market that is growing in Europe. While it has become a standard practice for medical students in the US to be trained using medical reference databases on their mobile phones throughout their education, mobile drug reference databases in Europe are an up-and-coming field. Given that there are fewer options for such databases in each country, we see that fewer European physicians are utilizing them on their mobile devices than their US counterparts.
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