Some stats on eHealth consumers and wired physicians

More and more people are using the Internet for health while fewer patients are going to see their doctors and picking up prescription medications. Physicians are also becoming more reliant on smartphones and want to use social media but for now their main concern is sharing information with each other.

1. Less people are going to their physicians -Insured Americans are using fewer medical services, raising questions about whether patients are consuming less health care as they pick up a greater share of the costs. ”People just aren’t using health-care like they have,” said Wayne DeVeydt, WellPoint Inc.’s chief financial officer. “Utilization is lower than we expected, and it’s unusual.”

2. Compliance is a problem that is costing America’s healthcare system a lot of money - One-third to one-half of all patients do not take medication as prescribed, and up to one-quarter never fill prescriptions at all, experts say. Such lapses fuel more than $100 billion dollars in health costs annually because those patients often get sicker.

3. Physicians want to get more involved with social media but they don’t have the time and they are worried about privacy issues of connecting with patients via social media.

94% of physicians are using smartphones to communicate, manage personal and business workflows, and access medical information.

Seventy-eight percent of physicians are experiencing difficulties accessing and communicating with colleagues in a timely manner. Physicians are busy mobile professionals who are constantly on the go and are not always available when they are needed.

Physicians report they are overwhelmed by the daily volume of communications received from colleagues, care team members, and patients. They lack automated tools to manage voice mail, pager messages, SMS messages, and electronic mail. They are forced to continually check separate data silos and manually filter and prioritize communications based upon sender, subject and priority. Critical communications easily fall through the cracks

4. The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is increasing every year

While the percentage of adults who go online (79%) has not changed significantly for several years, the proportion of those who are online and have ever used the Internet to look for health information has increased to 88% this year, the highest number ever.

Fully 81% of all eHealth consumers have looked for health information online in the last month. And 17% have gone online to look for health information ten or more times in the last month. On average, eHealth consumers do this about 6 times a month.

Very few eHealth consumers are dissatisfied with their ability to find what they want online. Only 9% report that they were somewhat (6%) or very (3%) unsuccessful. And only 8% believe that the information they found was unreliable.

Just over half (53%) of all eHealth consumers report that they have discussed information they found online with their doctors.

Half (51%) of all eHealth consumers say they have searched for information on the Internet based on discussions with their doctors.

So what does all this data mean ? It means that there is one hell of an opportunity to open the doors wider on digital marketing. The idea of simply building a website and spending money on search is not going to be sufficient anymore if DTC marketers really want to reach patients and help them consider their products in their decision making. Even without social media there are a lot of opportunities to improve digital marketing. The mix of budget should really be reviewed and more dollars should be allocated to the channel which influences decision making the most and that is the Internet.