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I would argue that every physician in the United States knows what UpToDate is. UpToDate is a clinical reference tool used by hundreds of thousands of physicians regularly.
It’s used by physician to find recent guidelines, disease treatment plans, and to learn more about disease pathology.
I reached out to UpToDate recently to see how their mobile medical app is performing based on the mobile operating platforms. If you haven’t yet, check out our review of the UpToDate app.
Dr. Denise Basow, President of UpToDate, responded to my questions with some of the following data:
- There are over 700,000 clinicians using UpToDate worldwide.
- 25% of the usage of UpToDate is on mobile devices.
- At the end of 2012, there were over 75,000 iOS users and over 10,000 Android users.
- When using the UpToDate mobile app, 90% of the access is from iOS and 10% is from Android.
So what does this mean?
Arguably the most popular clinical reference tool by Physicians is dominated by iOS — with more than seven times the iOS users verse Android. It also demonstrates that a significant amount of Physicians are using mobile technologies, with one fourth of UpToDate usage on mobile devices.
When we are asked by Android users why medical developers don’t produce more Android versions of their apps, you need not look further than the data presented here. Developers see a significantly higher uptake of their medical apps on iOS than they do on the Android platform because Physicians are on iOS.
All of this shows that Apple’s mobile devices have a distinct mindshare and statistical advantage over Android in regards to Physician preference. We’ll check back in with UpToDate in a few months to see if the data changes at all.
