John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Physician Internet Use – 39% Email Patients
December 18, 2007
In a survey by Jupiter Research reported by iHealthbeat, the range of Internet usage is reported with some changes since one year ago. 89% this year vs 75% the previous year reported using the Internet for researching clinical information. While this doesn’t imply diagnosis via Google, it does show a continued growth toward the physician not using the Internet as the exception. Reading journals and communication with colleagues also showed increases – could this imply the future of the medical journal and hope for physician social networking, as in Sermo and Within3?
Finally, patient-oriented activities, while not scoring as high, had respectable increases – 69% searching for patient education materials and 39% (almost double in one year) emailing patients, we hope securely.
