We’ve been doing some work recently on our next generation of digital magazines (more about that soon). It’s an interesting project as we’re trying to do things that push the “technology envelope.”

Last week as I was working on this project when a fundamental question struck me: “How do people actually read a magazine on their iPad anyway?”

If you’re involved in any kind of content marketing or app building this is an important question. You can’t really provide a great user experience if you don’t know how people view your content.

Being the data-driven engineer that I am, I could not just let this question go. I needed to find some quantitative research. This is what I found.

Nearly two thirds of Americans own smartphones, including more than half of Americans over 55. Of those smartphone users, 62 percent have used their phones to look up health information.

Patients want to engage with their healthcare providers on their phones, but hospitals and health systems that haven’t adopted a mobile-first mindset are limiting their ability to do so, and most that have still have room to grow. Here are six areas to be mobile-friendly in 2016 and beyond.

We sure do love our phones.

• 46 percent of smartphone owners “couldn’t live without” their phone (Pew)
• 80 percent of millennials say their smartphone is the first thing they reach for when they wake up (Zogby)
• 87 percent of millennials say their smartphone never leaves their side (Zogby)

We used to talk in digital marketing about designing for the “second screen”, meaning phones. But today we need to think of smartphones as our patient’s “first screen.” This means making your marketing look great on a phone even if that means it looks less great on a desktop.

New research from Google highlights where we need to focus our attention as marketers.