Three years ago physicians were adopting smartphones twice as fast as the average U.S. consumer, according to Forrester Research. These early adopters are also always on the move, an opportunity spotted by PatientKeeper and Sage Software.

Both companies have partnered to offer physicians access to clinical and financial information on mobile devices.

"We have been around since 1997 and we have been focused on mobility since then," said Stephen S. Hau, founder of PatientKeeper, Boston. "We are very well adopted by hospitals, with about 10 percent of all hospitals in the United States using our technology.

"We have been successful and are now looking to provide a useful service to physicians with small practices," he said. "It makes a lot of sense for physicians, who are either en route from home to the office and then to the local community hospital. These individuals do not sit at a desk. We partnered with sage because they are No. 1 in this country in terms of market penetration."

The partnership will no doubt have an impact on healthcare delivery.

PatientKeeper, a provider of integrated physician information systems, and Sage Software, a provider of practice management and EMR services, intend to facilitate interoperability.

In essence, the firms will give doctors access to electronic health records and patient information from both inpatient and outpatient sources in a single, unified user interface.

PatientKeeper's applications provide a single point of anytime, anywhere access to clinical and financial data from multiple, disparate systems.

Sage Software creates products that support accounting, operations, customer relationship management, human resources, time tracking, merchant services and the specialized needs of the construction, distribution, healthcare, manufacturing, nonprofit and real estate industries.

The partnership will extend PatientKeeper's market reach and will help the company connect the community through the integration of both inpatient and outpatient data.

"Basically every physician carries a mobile device or a smartphone and what we have is a remote host and we manage the server that physicians connect to," Mr. Hau said. "Doctors will have access to their patient list [and] patients on their schedule and administrators can add stuff like each patient's clinical information, allergies, medications and notes.

"Also accessible to handheld devices is the ability to capture charges -- one challenge that doctors are facing with billing these days," he said.