Get Wired or Get Retired: The Digital Gap in Medicine

 

Where are patients getting health information?

A recent survey of Internet habits by the New York PR firm Makovsky + Company has uncovered a notable phenomenon: half of all Americans visit WebMD.com. That this website is popular is not particularly surprising. What is surprising is just how popular. How many other websites can boast attracting half nation’s population? WebMD is in very rare company in this distinction.

More astonishing is the survey finding that Facebook is the fourth most popular online resource for health care information, drawing one in nine Americans for that purpose. However, user-generated content on social-media websites is less trusted – only 54 percent of survey respondents said they can rely on the accuracy of health information on Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, compared to 68 percent saying they trust WebMD.

Web pages published by the U.S. government are the most trusted, and, not surprisingly, websites sponsored or published by pharmaceutical companies are the least visited by Americans seeking health information (6 percent).

Notice anything missing here? Where is the survey question about health-information sites published by health care providers? Presumably, there are so few that it never occurred to the study sponsors to ask about them. Which leads us to the true digital gap in medicine today.

The last digital gap

In the era of Facebook-fueled revolutions in the Arab world, it’s hard to imagine an industry more behind the computer-and-Internet times than health care. In a 2009 survey of U.S. hospitals, the Harvard School of Public Health found that a mere 7.6 percent possessed even a basic EMR (electronic medical records) system. A miniscule 1.5 percent had a comprehensive EMR. A year earlier, a similar survey of nearly 3,000 medical practices found only 13 percent of physicians in private practice had basic EMR systems and 4 percent had comprehensive systems.

Are we on the verge of an upsurge in EMR adoption? Perhaps. Under the 2009 economic stimulus plan, the federal government is offering to pay $44,000 per physician for EMR adoption.

Mind you, to date much of this push for electronic records has been in the context of physician-to-physician usage: widespread EMR usage would theoretically enable the easy transfer of a patient’s clinical records from one specialist to another.

The ubiquity of wired patients

All this bodes well for the health of patients. But what about the health of private medical practices? How do computer networks and digital data figure into the business equation of medicine?

For me, a more interesting survey (assuming one has not been conducted) would be an assessment of the portion of medical practices with up-to-date websites, particularly Web 2.0 sites that allow patient-to-practice interaction and, probably more importantly, patient-to-patient interaction.

Is anyone not online these days? Consider:

• Four in five (80.6 percent) of American households have access to the Internet, according to the Pew Research Center.
• A nearly equal portion (85 percent) of Americans own cell phones, and six of ten access the Internet wirelessly, according to Pew.
• Pew reports that the fastest growing groups in Internet adoption are the elderly (in 2008-2009, Americans age 65-plus with home access to the Internet increased from 19 to 30 percent) and low-income households (with incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 annually), increasing from 42 to 53 percent in the same period).

So, in response to the question, is anyone not online these days, the clear answer is yes, doctors. And it’s time for physicians to catch up to the rest of the world.

Joining Web 2.0 conversations everywhere

Health care conversations and information seeking are everywhere out there on the ‘Net, and for a physician to succeed in recruiting and retaining patients, s/he will have to be part of those conversations sooner than later. But too many still cannot even be easily found in a Google search.
In the free marketplace, consumers base choices on haves and have-nots. With time, more and more will gravitate to health care providers that have online accessibility.

Bottom line: Before long, doctors will have a simple choice – get wired or get retired. The forces of competition will guarantee it.