In the past, doctors relied on what they’d memorized in medical school to treat patients. But in today’s fast-paced, tech-heavy society, they’d do much better in knowing how – and where – to access information.

And with more than 90 percent of all physicians using a smartphone these days, the answer just might lie in mHealth.

That was the subject of a two-day conference held March 30-31 in Chicago. The 3rd mHealth Networking Conference, organized by the Boston-based mHealth Initiative, brought together roughly 100 healthcare executives to discuss ongoing projects, legislative activities and other issues related to the delivery of healthcare through mobile applications.

[See also: mHealth apps forecast to increase threefold by 2012.]

“We really have entered a network society,” mHealth Initiative Vice President C. Peter Waegemann announced in opening the conference. “The value of healthcare (for physicians) now lies in how we know where to look for information.”

Waegemann pointed out that there are now more than 4,000 medical apps on the market, with another 2,000 related to consumer wellness or physical fitness. While many of those apps are downloaded, used once or twice and then forgotten, he said, many others are gaining mainstream attention. And while he lamented that it’s easier now to find a seat on a plane than it is to find a doctor who has an opening this week for an appointment, he said he expects an mHealth breakthrough to happen at any time.

“We’re getting into the second generation, where you will see a lot more implementation than you have seen before,” he said. “The future … is communication-enhanced healthcare.”

The conference featured a little bit of everything, from companies developing new mobile health apps to presentations on programs targeting diabetes care for teens and tuberculosis treatment in India. A panel discussion, meanwhile, focused on the often-confusing standards for regulating medical devices – and wondered openly why a popsicle stick isn’t a medical device, but a depressor is.

“They’re still in a very catch-up and a very reactive mode,” said Madeline Pantalone, vice president of strategy and business development for GreatCall, of the Food and Drug Administration, which is charged with regulating medical devices. “There’s a lot of conflicting information.”

Robert Jarron, senior director of government affairs for the San Diego-based telecommunications giant Qualcomm, said the FDA and other agencies with a hand in governing medical devices are working with 30-year-old regulations that don’t mesh well with the ever-changing mobile healthcare market. He noted that in testimony on Capitol Hill last year, an electronic health record could conceivably be designated a medical device – thus opening the door to a host of devices, services and software solutions that may or may not be skirting the law.

The panel, which was moderated by Dane Stout, executive director of the mHealth Regulatory Coalition and included, besides Jarron and Pantalone, Pete Paasivirta of Nokia and Mark Gryzwa of Boston Scientific, debated whether the industry needs more regulation or just better guidelines. Some suggested more guidelines would clear out the small companies with questionable products, while others wondered if that would stifle creativity.

[See also: IT chief: mHealth moving forward faster than expected.]

“A lot of innovation comes out of small companies these days,” Pantalone pointed out. “They can’t afford to be tied up in regulatory guidelines.”

Another example of mHealth’s influence on healthcare was offered by Andrew Barbash, a neurologist with Holy Cross Hospital in Maryland who used his smartphone and a laptop to create a mock conference with four other healthcare professionals scattered around the country.

“I think we are in an era where we need to be self-empowered,” said the former Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente staff member. “The total game-changer is clinician-prompted communications … that replicate the process of what everybody really wants.”

Barbash questioned whether healthcare providers are getting too hung up on technology, saying they’re “very resistant to the concept of completely empowering the end-user.” He said physicians need to take charge of their own availability management, establishing their own web-based presence to dispense healthcare. “We want people to be able to talk to each other (and) we want technology to not be in the way,” he added.

“At the end of the day, the problem is not technology,” he said. “It’s workflow."