The internet has fundamentally changed the way Americans receive and share information. As a health communication professional, I have always had a particular interest in the way this impacts health care. The Pew Internet & American Life Project sheds light on this in its various studies of the Internet and health care.
According to Pew, 79 percent of American adults are online, and 6 in 10 American adults go online wirelessly each day. Thus, online and mobile tools are a huge -- and relatively untapped -- resource for improving health and health care quality.
Pew's Associate Director of Internet Strategy, Susannah Fox, outlined the very tangible improvements that digital tools can make in health care in her September 2010 Pew presentation to the Mayo Clinic -- itself a leader in online health information sharing.
Pew found, for example, that mobile tools can drastically increase treatment adherence among teens with chronic illnesses. Mobile technology was used to monitor their health behaviors, and intervene via text message as appropriate. Medication adherence is a significant challenge among all chronically ill patients, and this is one illustration of how health care practitioners can harness new technologies to improve adherence in order to better manage these diseases.
Fox's presentation underscores a key principle of communications today: it is critically important to reach audiences where they are today. As Fox noted in her presentation, if you're not online, or you're not mobile, you're not reaching some of your audiences.
Beyond just implementing digital medical records (which is another critical tool to improve the quality and efficiency of American health care) there is a tremendous opportunity to implement online and mobile tools to remind patients to take their medications via text message, answer questions via mobile applications, or connect patients with similar conditions.
Unfortunately, most physicians are far from adopting such advanced online tools in clinical practice. In fact, physician use of the Internet to search for health information is only 86 percent, and 70 percent of physicians spend less than 3 minutes per day researching a patient scenario online, according to a study by Google.
Digital tools to improve health care represent a huge missed opportunity to date.
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