19 Oct Rock Health: What are consumer attitudes to digital health?
Rock Health has released a report on consumer use of digital health that offers a few surprises. The survey of 4,000 consumers shows that while most people limit themselves to searching for health information online for things like prescription medication, symptoms and their potential causes, there’s plenty of curiosity for telemedicine, remote monitoring and using texts and emails to get health info. I’ve highlighted some of the findings here.
Online searches, physician reviews dominate
When most people think of digital health this it is Googling things like conditions and symptoms (81 percent) and looking up physician ratings (50 percent). Although tracking different aspects of health through apps is used by a significant number of respondents (17 percent), genetic services and telemedicine are only used by 7 percent of respondents. 32 percent said they had adopted two of these digital health tools.
Prescription drug info tops the list of online search targets
Rock Health illustrated the connection between online searches and putting that information to practical use. Of the 60 percent who looked up prescription drugs and their side effects, about 35 percent used that information in a conversation with their physician to either see if their doctor can give them a prescription for a certain drug or discontinue a current prescription. More than half of respondents who did an online search based on symptoms (57 percent) used that info to have a conversation with a doctor about a diagnosis for symptoms the researched online (45 percent).