According to a just released

According to a just released HIMSS study, IT use continues to grow inside physician practices. The one figure that jumps out at me is the 72% of physician offices that said they had "doctors who practice medicine with a hand-held computer of some type, such as a personal digital assistant." That's a pretty impressive number, if true. Of course, keep in mind that the methodology for this survey is not exactly spotless. First off, it was done online, so you would expect the numbers to skew toward docs who use technology. Secondly, although the press release is cleverly written to say "Over 5,000 physicians, practice managers, and health care executives were invited to participate in the survey from Aug. 8 to 26, 2002," a closer reading of the full study reveals that only 453 responses were actually used to tally the results. (For those of you with a statistical bent that means every result in the study is 95% accurate with a range of plus or minus about 4.5%)