Health Trends: eHealth Consumers
In this episode of Health Trends we sit down with Meredith Abreu of Manhattan Research. Manhattan Research just released their annual Cybercitizen® Health report.
Cybercitizen® Health is a syndicated consumer study and marketing data set of Manhattan Research, primarily focused on key research topics and trends impacting the ehealth market. The study objectives are to identify and analyze the behavior, attitudes and demographics of the consumer population using technology for health purposes. It is clear that ehealth is “going mainstream” in the U.S. with 116 million consumers using the Internet for health information and services. Along with this growth comes the need to further segment the population into relevant sub-segments, such as condition groups, utilization and motivation.
Cybercitizen® Health explores topics such as the Internet, email communication with physicians, DTC advertising, health ecommerce, plans and providers, use of pharmaceutical information online, health information seeking methods and more.
Key points:
- Consumers are becoming increasingly empowered and responsible for their healthcare decisions
- They are exercising this power by going online for additional information in droves, and in many cases challenging their physician
- In the past 2 years, consumers have become much more satisfied with the health information they find online – while becoming less satisfied with the information they get from their physician.
- Consumers are becoming very comfortable with researching health information online – perhaps too comfortable. Nearly half of consumers researching health info online are almost exclusively reliant on search engines to find that information – and without editorial oversight of search results, consumers are left to be the expert and sort through the information they find.
- Despite being comfortable with using the Internet for health information, consumers have a certain degree of wariness about health IT initiatives such as electronic medical records, with two-thirds of U.S. adults reporting they are “not at all interested’ in having their health information stored electronically.
2007 Consumer Health Trends
As Time magazine noted in voting “You” the person of the year, we, the collective body of consumers, are more and more in control of the media we consume, the information we’re exposed to, and the decisions we make. Nowhere is this more apparent – for better or for worse – than when it comes to healthcare.
Like it or not, today’s consumers are bearing increasing responsibility for their healthcare. The trend toward “consumer driven healthcare” has put difficult financial and treatment decisions in the hands of the consumer – forcing today’s consumers to take ownership of the business of their healthcare.
The Internet has emerged as a critical tool for consumers as they seek to navigate their healthcare choices, with over 116 million consumers go online for health information today. With this increase in empowerment comes a certain wariness – consumers are also less likely today to be satisfied with the information they receive from their physician, and more likely to challenge their physician if they do not agree with a diagnosis or treatment decision. This wariness also extends to health IT initiatives – despite overall consumer interest in researching health topics online, consumers are less-than-enthusiastic about things like electronic medical records – a technology which, paradoxically, consumers might feel permits them less control over their personal health information.
With these forces in mind, here are some of the key trends among today’s empowered health consumer:
Today’s Savvy Consumers are Less Satisfied with Their Physician
Over the past few years, there has been a drastic increase in the number of consumers going online for health information. In fact, “eHealth Consumers” are the new majority – with more than half of U.S. adults reporting that they have gone online for health information.
Additionally, consumers today are more satisfied with the health information they find online than they were even just two years ago. However, if we look at the historical data, we see that as the Internet has increased both in reach and relevance as a health information source, consumer satisfaction with information from their physician has decreased. As today’s physicians are pressed for time, consumers are finding that it’s easier to go online for information than it is to find the information they need during a brief 5-minute visit with their doctor.
Consumers are Increasingly Comfortable Fending for themselves when Finding Health Information Online
A few years ago, when consumers were asked how they typically go about finding health information online, on average they reported that half of the time they used a search engine to find the information they were looking for, and half the time they went directly to a website they were familiar with. This was understandable – in the early days of navigating online content, it was difficult to know which information was trustworthy — so consumers were perhaps more likely to trust the big-name sites that contained accredited content
Over the past two years, however, there has been a substantial shift in consumer behavior in this regard. Today’s eHealth Consumer uses a search engine to find health information more than two-thirds of the time on average – and nearly half of consumers looking for health information online report they use a search engine first more than 90% of the time – making a large portion of the health information seeking population almost entirely reliant on search engines to bring them to the information they seek. This type of search engine reliance requires a high degree of Internet savvy – as well as a large measure of health knowledge in order to sift through results that are trustworthy and reliable. While there are some filtered health-specific search engines (such as Healthline.com) beginning to emerge – for the moment, convenience seems to be king when it comes to the driver behind search engine reliance – so the sites consumers are primarily using for health searches are the same ones they use to track down the latest gossip about Britney Spears.
And, of course, the degree to which consumers are successfully sorting through health information online remains to be seen. As consumers become increasingly comfortable with the “Web 2.0” means of online communication and content generation – through blogs, community messageboards, and social networking sites – there is likely to be an abundance of misinformation being passed around unchecked.
Electronic Medical Records – Who Cares?
But for all their tech savvy when it comes to researching health information online, consumers are noticeably lackluster in their interest in health IT initiatives such as electronic medical records.
When asked about their interest in accessing health records electronically, only 1% of U.S. adults report currently using electronic medical or health records, while 64% report they are “not at all interested in using” an EMR.
Given the lack of consumer interest, can we expect EMR adoption will instead be driven by physicians? The story there is not any more encouraging: only 26% of primary care physicians use electronic medical records in their office, and almost one-third of PCPs have no interest in using electronic medical records in the future.
What does this mean for the future of the health IT movement? Adoption of electronic health records will clearly not be driven by consumers, who are not convinced that electronic health records are necessary; nor will adoption be driven by physicians, who in many cases, are unwilling to foot the bill or invest the time and resources required for such a substantial change in practice management – and especially heavy burden for smaller practices.
Instead, the electronic medical record movement will have to be driven by government legislation or by incentives from payers, who stand to benefit from the vast opportunities for data mining that could be made available through electronic medical records.
The current administration is beginning to recognize the necessity of electronic medical records for cost containment, outcomes measurement, and a myriad of accessibility reasons highlighted by the Hurricane Katrina disaster – and has set a national goal of making EMRs the norm within the next 10 years. But is this an achievable goal? While EMRs are a critical next step for our country’s healthcare system – don’t expect there to be vocal public outcry if these goals aren’t met.
Source: Manhattan Research Cybercitizen® Health v6.0, Taking the Pulse® v6.0
The government should organize easy access to Medline and Health topics, medical dictionaries, directories and publications. WBR LeoP
Who really now is engaged in the control of health? To mine it neglected the large pharmaceutical companies and the medical centers. There should be a centralized management WBR LeoP
I wonder how American Health Management Association provides medical records professionals with educational resources and programs? WBR LeoP