Nearly 90% of U.S. Online Adults Have Looked Online for Health Information
According to recent data from The Harris Poll conducted by Harris Interactive, nearly nine out of 10 U.S. online adults have ever looked online for health information. Search engines and medical websites are the primary go-to online places for health information.
According to the poll, which surveyed 1,019 adults by telephone between Aug. 9 and Aug. 15, 89 percent of online adults in the U.S. have ever looked online for health information, up from 88 percent in 2010. In 2001, this number was 75 percent.
This translates to 74 percent of all U.S. adults (or 173 million U.S. adults) who have ever looked for health information online, down from 76 percent in 2010, but up significantly from 47 percent in 2001.
Meanwhile, 60 percent of all adults have looked online for health information in the last month, down from 62 percent last year, but up from 27 percent in 2001.
According to Harris Interactive, 39 percent of U.S. adults who are online said they look online for information about health topics “often,” up from 32 percent in 2010 and up from 16 percent in 2001.
Another 34 percent said “sometimes,” down from 41 percent in 2010 and up from 30 percent in 2001. Meanwhile, 16 percent said “hardly ever,” up from 15 percent in 2010 and down from 30 percent in 2001. Eleven percent said “never,” unchanged from last year and down from 25 percent in 2001.
When posed the question “When you look for information online about health topics, where do you usually go to look for information?” 69 percent of adults who’ve searched for health information online said search engines, followed by 62 percent who said medical websites. Meanwhile, 16 percent said forums where people ask/answer questions, and 8 percent said social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Thirty-one percent of adults who’ve search for health information online said they’ve looked for information online about health topics in the last month 1-2 times, while 26 percent said 3-5 times, 4 percent said 6-9 times and 19 percent said 10+ times. The average number of times these U.S. adults have looked for health information online in the past month is 7.9, up from 3.0 in 2001. The median is 3.0, up from 1.1 in 2001.
Meanwhile, 90 percent of adults who’ve looked for health information online said their search was very or somewhat successful, while just 6 percent said they were very or somewhat unsuccessful.
The poll also found that 90 percent of these adults said they thought this information is very or somewhat reliable, while 4 percent said they thought this information is very or somewhat unreliable.
Separate numbers from comScore show that in June, 139.1 million unique U.S. visitors visited health websites, up 60 percent from 86.9 million back in 2008. Health sites reached about two in three Americans in June.
Sources:
http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2011/08/health-sites-reach-2-in-3-americans-monthly/
