Understanding healthcare marketing on the net: health information retrieval affected by eHealth literacy and information accuracy.

• Author: Erdem, S. Altan

1. INTRODUCTION

   Internet use has been systematically increasing around the World. Just in the U.S., the new Internet users grew from 66 to 73 percent in 2006 as consumers reported that they spent more time on the Internet than on television. Coupled with this trend, it is a fact that Internet use has been gaining acceptance by more and more businesses as a viable tool too.

   1.1 Internet: Popular Tool for Healthcare Industry

   Given that healthcare industry consumes about 13.5 percent of the gross domestic product in the U.S. (Gardner, 2000), it is not surprising that Internet use has been gaining acceptance specifically within the healthcare industry. Eighty percent of US Internet users look for health and medical information online (Fox, 2005). These users are just a click away from over 100,000 health related websites, government health sites, professional organizations, journals, medical texts, and drug reference books, as well as over 12 million citations through PubMed, the online search service of the National Library of Medicine (Morahan-Martin, 2004). According to comScore Media Metrix, a digital market research company, the first quarter of 2007 witnessed an overall 12 percent growth in the online health information category. The same study reported that the health information category reached an average of 55.3 million visitors (about one third of all U.S. Internet users) per month in the first quarter of 2007 and WebMD Health accounted for 17.1 million of these visitors (Della et al., 2008).

   Physician websites are becoming rather popular in the world of healthcare too (Morahan-Martin, 2004). It was reported in 2003 that more than 30% of practicing US physicians reported having a practice website (Bard, 2003) and the number was on the rise. It has also been reported that 98 percent of US physicians are online and spend at least 50 minutes per night online researching disease information, drug information, and to a lesser degree, Continuing Medical Education information. Recognizing these trends, the pharmaceutical industry has been increasing its expenditures on Internet drug advertising over the years (Jarvis, 2001) as substantially more hospitals have been using the Internet to reach their patients (Fell and Shepherd, 2001; Lin et al., 2001).

2. IMPROVING HEALTHCARE QUALITY

   It has been suggested that the Internet has contributed to the merging of cultural perspectives and the understanding of many diseases (Schiavo, 2007). While there are some potential problems associated with the Internet use in healthcare, there is no doubt that Internet offers numerous opportunities to improve healthcare in general. As an example, a review pharmaceutical marketing on the Internet presents a well-improved picture since customer satisfaction with online prescription drug buying has been rather high (Gurau, 2005). On the business management side, many have suggested that Internet-based practice management, catering to physician/patient needs, completing medical forms, coordinating appointments/referrals, accessing diet/nutrition information, and verifying post-operative care procedures, can gradually minimize the unnecessary back-office management (Kwon and Xie, 2003; Shinkman, 2000). In addition, having user-friendly websites to address specific healthcare needs benefits both patients and practitioners. Patients are provided with valuable and comprehensive information at low cost. After all, it has been reported that many patients do not entirely comprehend the information that they are presented with in the examination room.

   Physicians have been facing more financial pressure as reimbursements from managed care and government have been decreasing while malpractice insurance costs have been increasing. Accordingly, they have been reacting to this pressure by seeing more patients daily (Alkhateeb et al., 2009). Unfortunately, this type of practice results in having somewhat of a limited time to interact with the patients in the examination room. It has been reported that there are times that patients feel that they are rushed and not given enough time to entirely comprehend the information that they are presented with in the examination room.

   Recognizing this problem, one would realize that offering an online medical bulletin board offers such patients an alternate outlet to use to improve their understanding of the issues without having to call their healthcare providers. With complete information available to patients at the click of a mouse, there would be fewer inbound calls made to doctors and that would result in a reduction in overhead for the physician's office in the long run (Goedert, 1999; Shepherd and Fell, 1998; Shinkman, 2000).

   2.1 Catering to Health Information Seekers Online

   More people go online for medical advice on any given day than actually visit health professionals, according to figures provided by the American Medical Association. While 70 percent of the users seek...