Survey Shows ‘Cyberchondriacs’ @ 110 Million Nationwide.

Ehealth (the use of the Internet related to health and health care) continues to grow, and a recent national survey finds that 110 million adults sometimes go online to look for health care information. Harris Interactive calls them “cyberchondriacs.” On average, they search the Web for this type of information three times a month, searching mainly through portals or search engines rather than by going directly to particular sites.

These are the results of The Harris Poll, a nationwide survey of 707 adults (18+) who are online from home, office, school, library or some other location. Surveys were administered by telephone between March 13 and 19, 2002.

Key findings of this survey include:

80% of all adults who are online (i.e., 53% of all adults) sometimes use the Internet to look for health care information. However, only 18% say they do this “often,” while most do so “sometimes” (35%), or “hardly ever” (27%).

This 80% of all those online amounts to 110 million cyberchondriacs nationwide. This compares with 54 million in 1998, 69 million in 1999 and 97 million last year.

On average, those who ever look for health care information online do so three times every month.

A slender majority (53%) of those who look for health care information does so using a portal or search engine which allows them to search for the health information they want across many different websites. About a quarter (26%) goes directly to a site that focuses only on health-related topics and one in eight (12%) visits first a general site that may offer a section on health issues.

Cyberchondriacs (those who go online for health information) tend to be younger (which fits the profile of frequent Internet users), and they are better educated and more affluent than the general population. Cyberchondriacs include 82% of people aged 18 to 29, 84% of those with postgraduate education and 77% of people with household incomes of over $75,000.

These data show that the Internet continues to be used by huge, and growing, numbers of the public interested in getting information about particular diseases or treatments or about staying healthy. The results also demonstrate the critical importance for health care websites to be quickly and easily accessible through search engines and portals.

Data from other Harris Interactive research show that, increasingly, cyberchondriacs are using the sites of established organizations – academic, governmental, pharmaceutical, etc. – rather than using “pure ehealth” sites.

For access to the complete data tables for this survey CLICK below:

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=299