Health information & the Internet

Health Information

The rapid growth in digital communication generally, has lead to equally rapid growth in the demand for innovative ways of approaching the problem of delivering information to patients. While it is often difficult to accurately interpret internet-use statistics, we can point to some indicative trends. Whether or not it is actually the case, as Nicholas et al. (2002) report, quoting work by Bowesley (1999), that health-related information is “second only to pornography in popularity”, evidence suggests that health is an important topic. ‘Bird-avian flu’, for example, made it into the Google Zeitgeist review of 2005 (see figure one), with recent research by the Oxford Internet Survey (OXIS, 2005), which surveyed UK internet use, reporting that 37% of British internet users had used the internet to conduct health-related searches.

Figure one: Frequency of Google Searches for Bird-Avian or Flu (Google Zeitgeist, 2005)".

Source -'mihealth Liverpool' - independent evaluation of mihealth | Download

UK Internet access

• 65% of households in Great Britain had Internet access in 2008 (16 million households)



• 56% of all UK households had a broadband connection in 2008, up from 51% in 2007



• 52% of people aged 55 to 64 had used the Internet within the last three months in 2006, and 15% of those aged 65 and over.

Office of National Statistics 2007

Convergent technologies

To focus on computers and home internet access alone would not convey the full picture. The ubiquity of devices like mobile phones, games consoles, PDAs and MP3 players, which take advantage of convergent technologies across telecommunications (phone calls, SMS, video and picture-messaging, Bluetooth, etc.) broadcasting (digital radio, mobile television, pod-casting, ring-tones, iTunes, etc.) and software design (with new compression techniques enabling a wider range of devices to handle larger amounts of information), means that more people own, and are familiar with, ICTs than some statistical measures allow.

Elderly internet users

Ownership of and familiarity with ICTS are more widely distributed than is often perceived to be the case. Although older people are less likely to own and use new technologies, the Office of National Statistics reports that in 2002, 30% of men and 20% of women over the age of 80 owned mobile phones, and that 10% of men and 5% of women over the age of 80 had accessed the internet in the period August-October of that year.

The 2005 survey showed that the elderly were also using the internet in complex ways, with 41% of those over the age of 65% who had used the internet, using it to buy goods online. In an area of constant change prediction is always difficult, if not foolhardy, but it seems likely that the rate of innovation, and the rate of diffusion through all parts of British society, will continue to remain high.

Source -'mihealth Liverpool' - independent evaluation of mihealth | Download