From search to transactions: Americans move along the eHealth continuum

4 in 10 Americans are scheduling appointments, subscribing to eHealth newsletters, and checking out services offered at hospitals online, compared to 2 in 10 who research treatment options and medical procedures.

According to study data gathered by National Research Corporation through October 2008, Americans are moving up the eHealth adoption curve beyond simple health search. A growing number of health citizens are conducting a broader set of health tasks online -- many of which show that people are also “going local.”

National Research Corporation (NRC) collects data from over 250,000 households for the company’s flagship product, the Healthcare Market Guide. Data covers patient perceptions including; satisfaction about providers, household healthcare utilization patterns, advertising recall, community needs and Internet usage.

In the survey, NRC gauges 24 online health functions that households might engage in over the last 12 months. Overall, healthcare Internet utilization was up nearly 10% over 2007. On average people use 4.7 of the 24 functions.

As the table indicates, there was a big jump in the proportion of people scheduling appointments online between 2006 and 2008. I questioned John Morrow, who works with NRC on this survey, about this leap from 8% to 41% of adults.

“What we are seeing is a shift from information retrieval to functional implementation among the panel users,” John observed. “This is a natural progression of function. For example, I once checked my stock quotes online and now I trade, interact with analysts, and commiserate with fellow traders,” he added. This functional shift is based on 233,036 survey panel responses gathered between May and October of this year.

Note several other areas of growth in consumers using online channels for doing their health business: checking lab results has increased from 7% to 10% over two years, refilling prescriptions online grew from 25 to 28%, and paying medical bills increased from 12% to 16%. A new category, researching personal health records, attracted 12% of people in 2008.

Thanks to NRC's Ginny Martin, President of Healthcare Market Guide, and John Morrow of KintoreMedia, for sharing these data with me. The Healthcare Market Guide Ticker™ now tracks this data monthly for nearly 300 unique markets in the U.S.

Health Populi's Hot Points: Researching treatment options and medical procedures was cited by 23% and 21% of health citizens, respectively. That these percentages are lower than, say, seeking directions to a hospital or finding a doctor through an online search directory may reveal that search is becoming a more mature service and may have reached an equilibrium in terms of consumer utilization. Other online tasks, such as the consumer side of ePrescribing, emailing with physicians (used by 10% of citizens), and online pre-registration (cited by 9% of people) have room to grow.

Another intriguing aspect of these survey findings is what I’ll call the “Craigslistification” of health searching. Beyond “Paging Dr. Google” on treatments and procedures, consumers are searching for information that helps them deal with health issues in their local communities. These functions include mapping directions to providers’ offices and hospitals, finding physicians, and scheduling appointments.

Health information and knowledge is global; health care delivery remains very much a local phenomenon.

NRC will continue to add web-based health functions to its monthly panel survey, and I will be anxiously awaiting new data releases to track the evolving eHealth citizen.