The facts are overwhelming when considering whether your hospital should go mobile. The small screen is the place to be. 
An astonishing fact: there are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones but do not have electricity in their homes. That shows the impact of mobile on our lives. It’s estimated that the off-grid, on-net population will reach 138 million by 2015.
Ann Tracy Mueller posted on healthcarecommunications.com statistics showing the use of mobile is growing exponentially. Citing Kevin Roberts from a Cisco report in his Blogging Innovation site, the case is made for the impact of mobile and the need for healthcare marketers to be mobile-savvy and mobile-ready.
- Global mobile traffic nearly tripled for the third year in a row in 2010.
- Mobile video traffic will exceed 50 percent of all mobile data traffic for the first time in 2011.
- In early 2010, iPhone use was at least four times higher than that of any other smart phone platform. By the end of 2010, iPhone use was only 1.75 times higher than that of number two, Android.
- There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015, up 56-fold from 14 million at the end of 2010.
- There will be more than 7.1 billion mobile-connected devices in 2015, roughly equivalent to the world’s population by then (7.2 billion).
The numbers are staggering. But they are understandable. Think how much you use your mobile device. How much you see the people around you using there’s. How many people do you know who don’t have a mobile phone? Probably not many. The numbers are clear. The stats are obvious.
As healthcare marketers, in the very least, we need to make sure our internet presence is mobile-friendly. And we should be exploring ways to create and use mobile apps to market our hospital. Information is being accessed from mobile devices, including information about one’s health. We must make sure our health information and information about our organization and services are easily mobile-accessible.
Not convinced yet? Here’s one more bit of information from Roberts that should remove any doubt about the need for our hospital to be mobile-friendly:
“The average smartphone will generate 1.3 gigabytes of traffic per month in 2015, 16 times more than the 2010 average of 79 megabytes per month. Growth in the next five years will see global mobile traffic reach 6.3 exabytes per month by 2015. How big is that? It’s been suggested that every word ever spoken by human beings would equate to five exabytes. So six every month is a lot of chatter!”
