According to survey released Wednesday by Manhattan Research, physicians are increasingly using online searches, E-mail, blogs, iPods, and other Internet technologies in their everyday practices.

Some findings of the survey:

• 579,000 U.S. physicians have high speed Internet access at their office or home
• 142,000 physicians report they use the Internet during patient consultations
• 610,000 physicians report using search engines to find medical information online.
• Google and Yahoo are the most popular search engines among physicians, yet they report varying degrees of relevance and satisfaction with the search engine results
• Medical portals such as Medscape, Merck Medicus, and UpToDate are used as well
• 333,000 physicians use some type of mobile device (PDA, smartphone, tablet PC)
• 40% of those surveyed reported using an iPod or MP3 player
• 487,000 physicians are users of "new media" (streaming video, downloadable audio content, blogs)

According to a USA Today article from March 2005 there are about 800,000 active physicians in the United States. So a majority of our users (76%) use search engines to find medical information online. More than half of our users have highspeed Internet and are using and taking advantage of new Internet technologies such as stream video, audio, and blogs.

This is a big wake up call and illustrates that our users are most definitely adopting these technologies. We need to get our online house in order to make sure we do not miss the boat. We also need to look at how we can extend our services beyond the realm of the physical library. For example, an electronic table of contents service.

What other ways can we extend our services to reach the users? Comment if you have any ideas, we can all benefit from a good brainstorming session.